Effectively Teaching Reading Comprehension to Students With Special Educational Needs in Inclusive, Intermediate and Special Classroom Settings: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Effective teaching plays a vital role in promoting student learning across various domains, including reading comprehension which is an indispensable skill for all learners but difficult to master for most. Recent studies have shown that the effectiveness of teaching is context-specific, influenced by both student characteristics and the classroom setting. These variations in effectiveness underscore the differential impact of teaching behaviors across classroom settings, so-called contingency effects. Therefore, this scoping review provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on effective teaching focused on improving reading comprehension outcomes for students with special educational needs (SEN). The primary objective is to identify both general and contingency effects, looking specifically at differences in effective teaching between inclusive, intermediate, and special education settings. Teaching behaviors were categorized according to three dimensions of the Great Teaching Toolkit: creating a supportive environment (CSE), maximizing opportunities to learn (MOL), and activating hard thinking (AHT). In total, 20 studies that met the inclusion criteria were reviewed. Most of these studies examined the effect of multiple teaching behaviors on reading comprehension outcomes of students with learning disabilities ( n = 13) in intermediate settings ( n = 10). Overall, many positive effects were found for teaching behaviors classified within the AHT dimension. However, investigating the effectiveness of CSE and MOL, a more nuanced and mixed picture was identified with some studies indicating nonsignificant effects on reading comprehension. Contingency effects were observed for the AHT dimension, favoring intermediate settings.