Examining the Efficacy and Efficiency of Word-Feature Feedback in Reading Instruction for Students With Intellectual Disability.

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of three different instructional routines and a no-feedback control condition on the acquisition of high-frequency word reading for elementary students with intellectual disability. The three conditions were whole-word feedback, letter-name feedback, and letter-sound feedback. The primary dependent measure was word recognition (i.e., the number of correctly read words). Participants included three fourth-grade students identified as having intellectual disability, taught in a special education classroom. We used an adapted alternating treatments design and randomly assigned words with similar phonetic structures to each condition. Letter-sound feedback was the superior condition for one student, whereas differentiation of conditions was not found for the other two students. We discuss the implications of our findings for selecting an instructional routine and the need for further research on how different feedback routines may support generalization to related literacy skills.