The effect of technology assisted education on reading comprehension skills of special education students

This research was carried out in order to determine the effect of technology supported education on the reading comprehension skills of special education students. For this purpose, it was tried to test the effect of technology support on the reading comprehension level of the study group consisting of 6th grade students with mild mental disabilities. This research, designed in a mixed design, was carried out with quantitative and qualitative data obtained from 20 middle school students with mild intellectual disabilities. For the experimental and control groups, texts belonging to 9 genres, which are sub-types of informative, narrative and poetry texts in the 2018 Turkish Course Curriculum, were presented to both the experimental group and the control group on a weekly basis. Relevant texts from these equal groups were presented to the control group students with traditional teaching methods, and these texts were presented to the students in the experimental group via an interactive board. After the texts were processed, a text evaluation scale consisting of 5 questions prepared separately for each text was applied to the students. Tests are evaluated over 100 points, each question being calculated as 20 points. With the help of the Retention Test conducted 2 weeks after the posttest, the level of interpretation of the texts that the students read was tried to be determined by the analysis method. When the research findings were examined, no significant difference was found between the pre-test scores of the students in the experimental group and the control group. However, when the Retention Test scores applied to the students as a post-test were compared, it was understood that there was a significant statistical difference between the scores of the students in the experimental group and the control group. As a result of the research, it was determined that the post-test scores of the students in the experimental group were higher than the scores of the students in the control group. After the Retention Test, a 5-question Application Evaluation Form, prepared to get the experimental group students' opinions about technology-supported education, was presented to the students and the answers to these questions were analyzed by content analysis method. In the light of the research findings, suggestions were made for the application and researchers. Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Turkish Teaching, Special Education, Technology, Language Skills, Material Development, Curriculum