The Read 180® Program and Reading Comprehension Strategies for Students with Disabilities

Many students with disabilities at the middle school level struggle to develop literacy skills. As a result, these students are placed in special education classes for remediation. Read 180® Next Generation is a comprehensive reading program designed for students with disabilities, English Language Learners, and struggling readers; although, there has been little outside research conducted as to its effectiveness. This study implemented the Read 180® over a five-week period. Specifically, it supplemented the intervention with 20-minute mini-lessons on direct reading strategies to the 90-minute block of Read 180® in order to determine if the added instruction would improve the reading lexile score of the participants in the study. This study used a quantitative quasi-experimental design using pretest and posttest. Independent and paired samples t-tests were conducted to determine if there were statistically significant differences between the means of both groups on the Read 180® Reading Inventory. The results indicated that there was no added benefit to the development of reading comprehension ability by incorporating direct reading strategies to the Read 180® program