A Comparison of Two Methods of Teaching A Reading Task to Mildly Intellectually Handicapped Adolescents

A group of eight mildly intellectually handicapped trainees at a Work Preparation Centre were taught to read two lists of words of equal difficulty by different methods. A pilot experiment had indicated that trainees had learned to read a list of difficult tool names incidentally while using an auto-instructional device (a 3M Sound-on-Slide projector) to identify the names of the tools orally. In the present experiment the effectiveness of this approach was compared with a more traditional paired-associate method of teaching word recognition. Results indicated that there were no differences between the methods on the rate of acquisition, nor were there differences between the levels of rentention after one week, one month, three months or six months. At least 90% of the words were retained on both lists by all students at the end of the six months period. The results are discussed in the context of theories of attention, associated clustering and overlearning. The implications for the use of auto-instructional devices are explored.