Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background & Objective: Reading and understand written content skill is one of the most basic problems in children who are mentally retarded. It can be said that the skill of reading is one of the most basic social and communication problems for children and adolescents with Down syndrome, which is an inability to enter to social world. Learning to low–speed in understanding children with Down syndrome is helped by developing the applied–readable materials to help train and develop skills with regard to serious problems that are in the field of abstract thinking. Applied reading is the ability to read, understand and implement the types of important reading materials in daily life and social situations. The purpose of this study was to develop a particular reading program for children with Down syndrome, and examining its effectiveness on understanding written content in the situations of everyday life.
Methods: The research plan was pretest and posttest test types with experimental and control groups. The statistical community included of pupils in elementary school with Down syndrome of Hamedan city (west of Iran), in 2016–17. Samples consisted of 30 children with Down syndrome that were selected and replaced in a randomly in two groups of control and experiment. Research tools include the Persian version of (WISC–R), Persian version of language development test (TOLD–P3) and there were two written texts that written by pretest and posttest test types, to measure understanding of written content, before and after intervention. In order to determine the validity of written texts, the percentage of agreement was used. For this purpose, it determined the achievement of mastery for the test, followed by two parallel forms of this test on a group of 30 students at the same base. Then the percentage of students who gained mastery in both tests was 0.89, respectively. In other words, the reliability coefficient of the test 0.89 was obtained. After conducting the intervention in 12 minutes session, the data were analyzed through the covariance analysis test and by using SPSS software (Ver.25). The application of an applied reading intervention program used in this study aims to develop a novel approach to improve the comprehension of developmental basis skills, linguistic programming of children with Down syndrome to enhance understanding of material and based on reading and listening skills of phonological awareness, psychological pattern–linguistic test of Illinois by the researcher.
Results: Univariate analysis and the Kolmogorov–Simonov analysis about the skill of understanding written material in everyday life situations showed significant differences between the average test and test groups, with the superiority of the test group scores (p<0.001).
Conclusion: The study showed that mentally retarded children with Dawn syndrome could be taught to learn the word decoding skills and reading new words, and they need to be trained in this regard as children's inability to read Down syndrome is associated with weakness in auditory memory and auditory perception. The results of the data analysis indicated that the applied reading program had a significant effect on the comprehension of written materials. Based on the results of this study, to teachers and pediatricians of children with Down syndrome are recommended to use a reading program that improves understanding of the written material in these children. Thus, the provision of education–based programmers and promoting awareness based on words that have the most everyday use in the natural and immediate environment could be an important step to improve reading performance behind subjective.

Background & Objective: Learning of reading and writing are basic skills, which unfortunately some children have problem in this process. Review of related literature supports this idea that many children and adolescents with Down syndrome, who have learned reading materials from an early age, could improve their spoken language and memory skills. Patients with more efforts and simplified tasks could learn to read in the same way as typically developing children. They build on their good visual memory skills but find it more difficult to use phonics. Reading skills in the patients, is one of the most basic tools for communication and social function. The present research addressed the developing an applied reading program and evaluation of its effectiveness on understanding written material on daily life situations in patients. 
Methods: The research was a quasi–experimental one with pretest–posttest design for two experimental and control groups. The research sample comprised 30 children and adolescents with Down syndrome who were selected through availability sampling among students of two special schools in Hamedan city (Hamedan province, West of Iran). Subjects were randomly assigned into two experimental (n=15) and control (n=15) groups. The research instruments included: A) the Wechsler intelligence scale for children– revised version (WISC–R), which this test has five primary index scores, the verbal comprehension index (VCI), visual spatial index (VSI), fluid reasoning index (FRI), working memory index (WMI) and processing speed index (PSI). Two subtests had to be administered to obtain each of the primary index scores; thus, 10 subtests were primary subtests. The full scale IQ was derived from 7 of 10 primary subtests: both verbal comprehension subtests, one visual spatial subtest, two fluid reasoning subtests, one working memory subtest, and one processing speed subtest. B) The Persian version of test of language development–primary 3 (TOLD–P3), which this test consists of 5 core subtests (picture vocabulary, oral vocabulary, grammatical understanding, sentence imitation and grammatical completion) which then comprise the overall composite score (language quotient). Three supplemental subtests (word discrimination, phonemic analysis, and word articulation) were provided for an expanded clinical analysis of “speech” systems, and C) two researcher–made written tasks as the pretest and post–test, they used to measure the written texts comprehension in the experimental and control groups. The intervention program was conducted in 12 sessions. Each session was 30 minutes. Some tasks were taken to parents as home tasks. This program was included basic reading skill tasks (phonological awareness, visual decoding tasks and vocabulary development). 
Results: Results of covariance analysis showed that Applied Reading Program had a significant effect on comprehension of written material in students with Down Syndrome (p<0.001).
Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, teachers and pediatricians of children with Down syndrome are recommended to use a reading program that improves understanding of the written material and reading performance in these children. The intervention evaluated here was novel in its integrated approach to reading and language instruction for children with Down syndrome and is educationally realistic.