The authors reviewed studies on teaching reading comprehension to students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) with a focus on text (academic reading) comprehension and sight word (functional) comprehension. Eleven of 754 studies met the inclusion criteria: participants with ASD, published in English in a peer-reviewed journal, and use of an…

An ABAB withdrawal design was used to investigate the effects of explicit timing on accurate oral reading rate of sight word phrases of four elementary students demonstrating difficulty with reading. During baseline the students were exposed to flash cards with sight word phrases and asked to read them out loud and were not made aware that they…

The study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of concurrent and isolation-intermix instruction in teaching four preschool children to read common words in their environment. Concurrent instruction resulted in students learning conditional discriminations in fewer trials and minutes of instructional time suggesting the value of teaching…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a cross-age (25 high school tutors and 6 elementary aged tutees) 6-week tutoring program. Findings indicated that all tutees acquired new sight vocabulary words after tutoring, were able to read the words in sentences, and maintained the learning four months later. (DB)

A multiple probe design across behaviors was used to evaluate the effectiveness of an articulation training program that included incidental information to teach basic sight word reading. Results indicated that the three subjects (ages 5-6) with sound production errors learned to read sight words during articulation training and that this learning…

This study compared immediate (after each error) and delayed (at the end of each session) error correction during sight-word instruction with 4 students (ages 7-9) with developmental disabilities. Immediate error correction was superior on each of four dependent variables. (Author/DB)

This study with 12 2nd- and 3rd-grade students with mild disabilities compared memory for new reading words following instructional sessions in which either word meaning or phonic cues were emphasized. The phonic instruction resulted in a greater number of words remembered either within sentences or on word lists. (Author/DB)

At prekindergarten screening, 84 children were evaluated with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) and the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration. Two years later, teachers' ratings of the students (now in first grade) on reading performance indicated that students with poor sight-word vocabularies performed lower on the…

The study, with four mildly retarded primary-age students, found that constant time delay was an effective instructional strategy when students were taught to read sight words and that incidental learning also occurred as each student acquired some nontargeted spelling information. (Author/DB)

Effects of 2 procedures (either whole word or phonetic-prompt) for error correction were compared during drills in sight word recognition of 5 students (ages 8 and 9) with developmental disabilities. Results from instruction, same-day tests, and next-day tests indicated that more words were learned in the whole word condition. (Author/DB)

An adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of two interventions using different intertrial intervals on sight-word mastery rates among three elementary students with behavioral disorders and learning deficits. Results found both interventions to be equally effective in increasing sight-word reading accuracy.…

Community-referenced sight words and phrases were taught to six adolescents with mild or moderate mental retardation, using three instructional methods in two locations. Results showed rapid acquisition of the sight words in all three training conditions and showed generalization from the flash card and videotape conditions to the community sites.…

A multiple-probe design across behaviors assessed the effectiveness of a simultaneous prompting procedure in teaching expressive identification of photos of community signs to two elementary students with moderate intellectual disabilities in a small group instructional arrangement. The procedure was effective in teaching both students the…

Three students (ages 17, 19, and 21) with moderate disabilities were taught to read and match-to-sample sight words comprising 4 4-member stimulus sets. Student performance indicated that symmetric relations emerged before one-node transitive relations and that one-node transitive relations emerged before two-node transitive relations. Results…

To determine how the difficulty of print materials affected elementary school students' sight copying accuracy and productivity and to explain correlate variance related to copying, 149 students in grades four, six, and eight were assigned materials to copy for three minutes. All subjects copied passages at grade level and at two grades above and…