We serve a number of children with autism who are between five and eight years and approaching academic levels comparable to their age group. For these children, we have been looking for a more effective way of providing academic instruction. Commercially available curricula are typically inadequate for children with autism since they do not break the learning into fine enough steps, do not have sufficient repetition or carefully crafted visual materials.

We have found what we think is a very good academic series that we are now using with many children to teach early reading and spelling skills. This program developed by Michael Maloney and his colleagues from Belleville is based on Direct Instruction. Direct Instruction is an approach that emerged in the 1970’s consistent with principles of applied behaviour analysis. At that time, Sigrid Engelmann and Wesley Becker began to develop a carefully thought out method of teaching concepts to children with special needs.

Much of their work has guided us in our understanding of how to teach concepts.

Michael Maloney, is a colleague from Belleville who has been using Direct Instruction for the last 30 years most often with children with learning disabilities. He has developed an award winning series called Teach Your Children Well. Mike has provided training to our staff.

Tutoring is provided in the child’s home by a trained and supervised facilitator.

Adapting Teach Your Children To Read Well for Use With Children With Autism

Joel Hundert, Ph.D., C.Psych., BCBA

&

Jane Lee, M.A.

Behaviour Institute

Many of the children with autism whom we serve have developed skills in basic academic areas to near or at age appropriate levels. At this point, we can choose between two options. One option is to continuie to provide custom-made programs to teach each academic skill within an academic domain one by one (e.g., labeling of numbers, counting with one-to-one correspondence, receptive discrimination of numbers, etc.).  or find a commercially developed curriculum series that does this for us. A second option is to find a commercially developed curriculum series that does this for us.  Although, there is no shortage of curriculum series that can be purchased to teach academic skills, there are very few that have the precision necessary for use in teaching children with autism.

The following is what we look for in an academic learning series:

• Has a curriculum that is comprehensive scope and developmental in sequence.
• Has a placement test to determine where within the instructional sequence to begin to work with a child with autism
• Uses performance-based progression.  The child should progress onto more difficult material only after achieving objective mastery criteria.  Mastery criteria should involve accuracy but in many instances fluency as well.
• There should be a specific correction procedure for errors that allows the child to have a model of correct response plus additional practice.
• Direct and frequent measurement of child response accuracy and fluency.
• Has a system of reinforcement to ensure the child is motivated.  Reinforcement should occur frequently at the beginning of the child’s learning and gradually be thinned out. Stimulus preference assessments should be conducted to determine what items or events may function as reinforcers.

The approach that we look for is one that has research evidence supporting the effectiveness of the intervention.  The use of direct instruction is one that has been demonstrated to be effective in teaching children with special needs (Carnine, Silbert, & Kameenui, 1990).  It is designed based on principles of behaviour analysis and has for the most part, the features described above. 

One of the commercially available programs that we widely use is “Teach Your Child to Read Well”, developed by Michael Maloney, Lynne Brearley and Judie Preece at the Quinte Learning Centre, Belleville, Ontario.  Michael has been a consultant in school, operated a private school, has written a prize-winning book (Maloney, 1998) and consults extensively on direct instruction, precision teaching and academic intervention.  His work has been described in Morningside Model of Generative Instruction (Johnson & Street, 2004) and cited in Kubina and Wolfe (2005). 

A Description of “Teach Your Child to Read Well”

This program series consists of five books arranged in sequence covering material from kindergarten level to eighth grade.  Each level contains a reader, workbook and instructor’s manual.  The curriculum progresses systematically starting with teaching beginning sounds to having the child to read within context.  The reading series is extremely well laid out and is ideal for a child who has begun to read individual words or sounds of words. 

We have used this reading series with over 100 children with autism with great success.  The programs cost approximately $75.00 and is therefore relatively inexpensive.  The materials contain a teacher script indicating very clearly how to present each task, expected child response and suggestions on how to provide corrections as well as incentives for children to learn.  It is based on principles of direct instruction and includes visual prompts added to letters to make the letter sounds easier to discriminate for children.  All in all, I feel that this reading series is potentially the best program for children with autism needing a systematic instructional sequence in reading.

Yet, there are a few limitations to this program that requires some modification.  The purpose of this description is to provide an outline of the modifications that we use when using this reading program with children with autism. 

Adaptations For Children With Autism

a) Data Collection

There is no system in place to take direct and frequent measurement of the child’s progress.  It is important to monitor how the child is doing so that performance can be evaluated on an ongoing basis and any necessary revisions can be made readily.  We keep track of two aspects of the child’s functioning.  First, is the number of lesson exposures that occurred prior to the child meeting the pre-set criteria. These are graphed on the on a page as shown in Figure 1.  The second type of data that are collected consist of recording the results of probes of the child’s functioning on the number of correct sounds read per minute, and the number of correct words per read per minute in both story reading and word list formats.  These 30-second probes are included within the program and we chart the results as shown in Figure 1. 

Each series is comprised of approximately 30-60 lessons, each of which is comprised of 5-14 skill-related subtasks. In levels 1A – 2, the level of difficulty increases incrementally with each lesson through the presentation of new phonemes and sound blends, increased vocabulary, and longer, more difficult comprehension exercises and story samples.  Each lesson presents these new targets along with a review of learned items. The graph in Figure 1 shows the number of lesson exposures needed for the child (BG) to master each lesson.  For example, it took BG one exposure to each task to master lesson 1 and four full lesson exposures to master  lesson 7.  Our goal is for the child to master each lesson within two exposures.  The table below the graph describes the results of BG’s sound and word fluency checks, which are built into each program lesson starting in lesson 5.  The above table shows the BG’s fluency rates for lessons 5, 6, 7, and 8.  Sound fluency refers to a child’s rate of saying sounds corresponding with printed letters and digraphs (e.g., th) per minute.   Word fluency consists of the child’s rate of reading individual words, presented in lists, per minute.  The targeted fluency level is 50 per minute for sound and 60 per minute for words. Upon mastery of lesson 9, all subsequent lessons employ the use of a third fluency check to measure the child’s per minute rate of reading words when presented in a story context. Each fluency check is re-presented over 5 lessons, with more difficult sound, word, and story fluency checks appearing every 5th lesson.

b) Mastery Criteria

There are no specific mastery criteria for accuracy that are used to determine when the child has learned each one of the lessons.  As previously described, the authors of the series do providesuggested mastery criteria for fluency probes.

We use a mastery criteria of at least 80% correct on presented material for the child to move ahead on each exercise and reading section. Teaching is maintained until the child is able to demonstrate this criteria.

c) Comprehension

The program focuses on a child’s acquisition of letter-sound associations, word-sound associations, sentence and paragraph reading.  The workbook exercises provide an opportunity for the children to practice writing sounds, words, and sentences with limited exposure to trials specifically designed to develop language or reading comprehension.  This is not an issue for children who are fluent in language so that when they pronounce the words they have an understanding of what those words mean.  However, it is an issue for children with limited receptive and expressive language abilities.

As a result, we have pulled together pictures associated with the words introduced in Levels 1 and 2.  As the children acquire the ability to pronounce those words, they then have exercises of matching the word to its corresponding picture.  Additional modifications have included the presentation of newly decoded words in the context of spoken sentences along with the use of supplemental instructions and prompts to help the child develop novel statements using target words. As the child progresses through the material and is able to read short stories, we add wh-question (i.e., what, who, where, when ) comprehension questions that require recall of the content of the read passage.  We do not ask inferential questions.

Summary

With the described adaptations, we find Teach Your Child to Read Well to be the best available reading curriculum series that we know of to teach children with autism.

References

Carnine, D., Silbert, J., & Kameenui, E.J. (1990) Direct instruction reading. Columbus, OH: Merrill.

Johnson. K.,  & Street, E.M. (2004). Morningside Model of Generative Instruction. Concord, MA: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.

Kubina, R.M., & Wolfe, P. (2005). Potential applications of behavioral fluency for students with autism. Exceptionality, 13(1), 35-44.

Maloney, M. (1998). Teach your children well: A solution to some of North America’s educational problems. Concord, MA: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.

Maloney, M., Brearley, L., & Preece, J. (2001) Teach your children to read well. Belleville, On: Teach Your Children To Read Well Press.