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Abstract: In the current study, we employed a concurrent multiple probe across participants design to examine the effects of an intervention package (i.e., response prompting, frames, technology) on sentence -writing for three participants, ages 10-12, with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Specifically, we taught participants to write multiple sentences to express an opinion about a passage they had just read. Our findings suggest that the package was effective and produced maintenance and generalization across all three participants.
Over the last few decades, there has been an increased emphasis on the expansion of literacy instruction for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Early researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of response prompting strategies (e.g., constant time delay [CTD], simultaneous prompting [SP], system of least prompts [SLP]) in teaching learners to name sight words and through multitudes of systematic replications they refined and established these procedures as evidence-based in the provision of literacy instruction for students with ID (Browder et al., 2006). More recently, researchers have sought to expand the application of these procedures to a broader range of literacy skills and instructional contexts. For example, several teams of researchers improved students' comprehension skills by embedding response prompting strategies into shared reading activities across different content areas including English and Language Arts (Browder et al., 2011; Mims et al., 2012), Science (Hudson et al., 2014), and Social Studies (Courtade et al., 2017). The results of these studies demonstrated that students with IDD can benefit from literacy instruction on skills beyond the naming of sight words and within the context of grade appropriate literature.
One area of literacy instruction that has received less attention is that of teaching students with IDD to express their ideas in writing. Written expression is complex in that it requires students to simultaneously execute an amalgam of skills to produce a response for a specified purpose. Unlike reading, whereas students are required to decode words to make meaning of text, when writing, students must generate text by encoding information from memory (McCutchen, 2000). Students with IDD often have difficulties in memory (Schuchardt et al., 2010) and thus, are more likely to face challenges in skills such as spelling, idea generation, and the organization of cohesive narratives (Belva et al., 2012; McCutchen, 2000; Varuzza...