Abstract

The research entitled “A Multi-Component Reading Intervention for a Student with Autism Spectrum Disorder” was conducted as a senior thesis project in the Psychological Science Department via a virtual fieldwork setting in the spring of 2021. The study involved a 14-year-old student diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The participant’s word recognition abilities, reading skills, and oral reading fluency were severely limited, which are crucial components to being successful in reading. Though there are a variety of reading interventions that can help students, utilizing a focus on keywords by implementing a flashcard rehearsal method has proven beneficial. The goal of the present study was to utilize a multicomponent reading intervention procedure with Incremental Rehearsal (IR) flashcards with the intent of improving reading within connected texts. It was hypothesized that the pre-exposure and rehearsal with previously unknown words would increase the frequency of these words being accurately orally read aloud in the connected texts. The results showed that an average of 82% of the unknown words that were worked with in the IR procedure were accurately read aloud within the texts (M = 0.824, SD = 0.089). These findings along with the participant’s own enthusiasm and progress in the intervention show that the present procedure is an effective way to practice phonemic awareness, keyword recognition, and oral reading accuracy among students who struggle with reading.