Research evaluating phonics reading programs for children with severe intellectual disabilities (ID) is limited. The current study investigated whether using an online reading program (Headsprout â Early Reading; HER) as supplementary reading instruction for children with a severe ID leads to improvements in reading skills as compared to children not receiving this additional instruction. Fifty-five children from a special school were randomly allocated into the HER group or a waiting list control group. For six months, children in the intervention group received HER as supplementary instruction, whereas children in the control group received only reading as usual' teaching. Pre-and post-intervention tests on standardised reading measures were conducted. Analysis of data from outcome measures indicated that the HER group made improvements at post-intervention in comparison with the control group, with medium effect sizes on two domains from the main outcome measure. These results support the case for a larger research trial of HER for children with severe ID.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Evidence suggests that reading interventions found to be effective with typically developing children may also be effective with children with developmental disabilities (DD). The Headsprout® Early Reading programme (HER) is an online reading programme accessible at home or at school. Previous research using HER with children with DD has been delivered by trained staff in special school contexts. However, access to trained staff is limited, and many children with DD do not attend special schools. These factors may limit the number of children able to benefit from a potentially effective intervention. Training and involving parents to support their child’s reading may increase the number of children who might benefit, and also reflects current education policy. We examined the feasibility of using HER with five children with Down Syndrome in a six‐month parent mediated intervention. Standardised tests of reading ability carried out pre‐post intervention, showed that skills with phoneme segmentation improved following HER, and word reading age improved on average 13 months (range 6 to 20 months). These data are promising and support a rationale for larger evaluation studies.

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