Main Idea Strategy Instruction to Support Middle School Students with Intellectual Disability

Despite the importance of reading comprehension, many secondary students with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) struggle with this skill. Students with ID also experience greater challenges in foundational literacy skills (i.e., skills related to phonological awareness) and the cognitive skills temporal processing and nonverbal reasoning (Van Wingerden et al., 2017, 2018). Limitations in these areas may make it difficult for students with ID to synthesize information (either when reading or listening to text) to be able to identify main ideas and summarize text -- essential reading comprehension skills. The inability to identify main ideas in text has important implications for middle school students with ID. Although several methods can be used to identify main ideas, Get the Gist (Klingner et al., 1998) is one of the most well-known strategies for main idea identification and has evidence of effectiveness supporting its use. The current article explains how teachers can provide middle school students with ID explicit instruction on how to use Get the Gist while also promoting students' background and vocabulary knowledge to support their reading comprehension needs.