Teaching Children with Down Syndrome to Read: Using Assessment to Guide Instruction
By Christopher J. Lemons
Children with Down syndrome (DS) can become independent readers. This understanding (and societal expectation) is relatively new in that twenty years ago reading instruction for this population was primarily focused on functional reading—and prior to that time, there was no expectation that children with DS would learn to read.
Most of what we are currently calling “The Science of Reading”—an approach to teaching reading that is based on decades of empirical research—applies to learners with DS. To increase reading skills, children need to initially ‘break the code’ and learn to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken language (i.e., phonological awareness) and to map these sounds on to the printed letters used to represent the sounds (i.e., alphabetic principle). Additional instruction, supports, and practice are needed to increase children’s ability to read increasingly difficult texts with fluency, to expand vocabulary and background knowledge, and to apply strategies to comprehend a variety of different texts for numerous purposes. Effective educators are able to enhance reading skills by adapting and intensifying early literacy instruction by using data to inform their instructional decisions. This process is called data-based individualization or DBI.
The purpose of our study was to examine the utility of one commonly used assessment, curriculum-based measurement (CBM), for learners with DS. CBM are brief, technically reliable assessments that provide guidance on students’ attainment of early literacy benchmarks such as letter sound knowledge, phonological awareness, and oral reading fluency. Examples of CBM include DIBELS and Aimsweb. CBM is most commonly used with learners without disabilities or with students who are at-risk of or with learning disability.
In our study, we selected 17 children with DS who had demonstrated positive response to reading intervention in our previous studies. We collected intervention-aligned mastery data (e.g., data indicating whether students were learning the specific letters and words we were teaching) and CBM. In this analysis, we examined whether CBM and related methods to set goals would capture the mastery represented in the intervention-aligned data. Findings were mixed in that performance on CBM did capture changes in letter-sound fluency and first-sound fluency, but not on more advanced skills such as word reading and reading of connected text. Further, less than a third of students attained goals established through a common CBM goal-setting procedure. Possible reasons for these findings, including insufficient duration of the intervention, are detailed in the manuscript.
The main implications from this study are: (1) Children with DS can learn to read and should be provided high-quality, data-driven reading instruction, (2) CBM has potential to monitor response to reading instruction for children with DS; and (3) Educators will likely need to supplement CBM with other forms of assessment including intervention-aligned measures of mastery to enhance the effectiveness of DBI and literacy instruction.
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Article Details:
The Effect of Supplemental Reading Instruction on Fluency Outcomes for Children With Down Syndrome: A Closer Look at Curriculum-Based Measures
Seth King, Derek Rodgers, and Christopher J. Lemons
First Published March 29, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/00144029221081006
Exceptional Children
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