A systematic review of strategies and computer-based intervention (CBI) for reading comprehension of children with autism

• Strategies and computer-based intervention (CBI) for reading comprehension of children with autism were reviewed.
• Focus was on vocabulary and text comprehension instructions.
• Multimedia methods and explicit instruction of vocabulary instruction were highly used.
• Question answering of text comprehension instruction was a more common strategy.
• CBI provided an effective mode of instruction to teach reading comprehension.

This paper presents a systematic review of relevant published studies on reading comprehension for children with autism, focusing on vocabulary instruction and text comprehension instruction from years 2000 to 2011. This systematic review attempts to address three specific research questions: strategies of vocabulary instruction and text comprehension instruction used, computer-based intervention (CBI) used or developed during study, and the effectiveness of using CBI for teaching children with autism. There are five strategies of vocabulary instruction and seven strategies of text comprehension instruction. Results indicate that two strategies of vocabulary instruction, multimedia methods and explicit instruction were found to be more commonly used than the other three. On the same note, question answering strategy of text comprehension instruction was discovered to be used more often than the other six. Results also indicate that children with autism can benefit from the strategies of reading comprehension and that the use of CBI as a mode of instruction for reading comprehension improved learning of children. This is clearly evident judging from the performance of children between pre-tests and post-tests of studies in which CBI was used. However, due to heterogeneity of participants, this is not always the case; a few studies reported no improvement in the learning of children with autism.