Investigation of the effect of reading understanding skills teaching based on ITO/AGSCÖ cognitive strategies on the reading skills of students intellectual disability

In order to develop reading and comprehension skills in a qualified manner and to use them effectively in mental processes, there is a need for practical training on strategies that will develop reading and reading comprehension skills from an early age. It is reported that students with intellectual disabilities in particular experience great difficulties in understanding what they are reading. The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of teaching reading comprehension skills based on ITO/AGSCÖ (analyze-guess-read (read the title, questions and text)-underline keywords-browse-ask a question-answer-summary) cognitive strategies developed in this study on the reading skills of students with mild intellectual disability. In addition, the effect of students' ability to generalize strategies to different types of texts and reading comprehension, the permanence of strategy use in maintaining 2, 4 and 6 weeks after teaching, and the effect of permanence on maintaining reading comprehension skills were investigated. The research is patterned with exploratory sequential mixed method model. The research was conducted with three students who were studying at a special education secondary school, fifth and sixth grade, diagnosed with mild mental impairment, and six teachers who worked with these students. By collecting qualitative data in the research, the results obtained from these data were formed from the pattern used in the quantitative research dimension. In order to determine the strategies to be used in the research, the reading comprehension strategies used by the teachers of the students selected as participants in their education were determined by the descriptive analysis technique. Taking into account the qualitative data results obtained and the cognitive reading strategies contained in the literature, the draft form created during the ITO/AGSCÖ strategies development process has been presented to the expert opinion by adapting it to the learning characteristics of students with intellectual disabilities. Opinions were received from two experts who completed their doctorate in the field of special education regarding the suitability of the items, and the internal consistency of the agreement between experts was tested with the Cohen Kappa technique. It was observed that the Kappa value obtained was 0.84 (Perfect agreement between 0.81-1.00). The effectiveness of teaching ITO/AGSCÖ strategies was planned with a multiple probe model between participants, one of the single-subject research designs, and Percent Non-Overlapping Data analysis and Tau-U analysis technique were used to calculate the effect size. The teaching of the strategies was carried out with the method of explicit expression and at the end of each teaching, the number of correct answers to the questions about the text was plotted on the graph. Generalization data were collected with the pretest-posttest model and the data were analyzed by showing them on a column chart. In the study, in order to evaluate the strategy use of the participants in the text reading process, the data collected on the strategy use before and after the instruction and the social validity data of the instruction were evaluated with descriptive analysis. According to the results of the research; It has been seen that teaching ITO/AGSCÖ strategies in the text reading process of students with mild intellectual disability is effective in improving their reading comprehension skills. It was concluded that the students were able to generalize their use of ITO/AGSCÖ strategies in the process of reading different text types, it was effective in their ability to understand different text types, they continued the strategy use in the follow-up sessions after the end of the instruction and their reading comprehension skills were permanent. According to the social validity data, it was concluded that the students and teachers found the application effective and applicable. In the last part of the study, the findings were discussed within the framework of the relevant literature, and suggestions were presented for research and applications.