Reading Comprehension Strategies: How to Support Special Education Students

For many special education students, the biggest barrier to reading comprehension may not be decoding. Rather, it may be invisible-thinking work happening underneath the surface: holding ideas in working memory, filtering irrelevant details, interpreting complex sentences, making meaning from discipline-specific language, and understanding how the text is structured.

Generic reading comprehension strategies rarely account for these demands — or for the processing differences many SPED students navigate daily.

And leaders often see the outcome (“They didn’t understand the text”) without always seeing the full cognitive load required to get there. That’s why reading comprehension support for special education students can’t rely on “one-size-fits-all” routines or strategies pulled from elementary classrooms.

This work requires intentionality, precision, and a deeper understanding of what comprehension actually demands for these students.

Why Generic Reading Comprehension Strategies Fall Short in Special Education

Here’s the truth:  most of the reading comprehension strategies we find in secondary schools were designed for students with ‘typical’ cognitive and linguistic processing.

These strategies assume students can:

• track multiple ideas through a long passage

• infer meaning independently

• switch between reading, writing, annotating, and discussing without losing focus

• decode AND process AND interpret all at once

But many special education students are managing comprehension on top of working-memory challenges, language-processing needs, limited background knowledge, executive functioning demands, and attention differences.

When the strategy itself overtaxes the student’s processing capacity, comprehension doesn’t deepen — it actually collapses.

This is why SPED students often appear disengaged, confused, or inconsistent in their use of strategies.  It’s not that they’re refusing to use them.  It’s that these strategies weren’t designed for the learners sitting in front of them.

For leaders and SPED teams, this is a call to shift to more intentional instructional design that better meets the challenges special education students face.

→ If you want to strengthen your understanding of how subject-area thinking affects comprehension, you might also like Disciplinary Literacy in Secondary Education: Why Schools Must Go Beyond ELA — it’s a powerful complement to this work.

What Reading Comprehension Requires for Special Education Students — and Strategies to Support It

So if generic comprehension strategies fall short, what does effective support look like for SPED readers?  To design meaningful supports for special education students, we first need a clear picture of what comprehension actually demands.

When you strip away the worksheets and routines, reading comprehension comes down to a set of cognitive conditions that must be in place before a student can make meaning from text.  Once we understand the conditions comprehension requires, the strategies start to align naturally.  

Let’s go through the cognitive conditions that support reading comprehension for our special education students, followed by the function-based supports that match how special education students process information.

1. Clear Purpose for Reading

Students can’t filter or prioritize information unless they know what they’re reading for. Purpose acts like a spotlight — it directs attention, reduces unnecessary processing, and helps students understand what matters (and what doesn’t).  Without it, they try to hold everything in their working memory, which is where overload happens.

Strategies That Clarify Purpose

Purpose clarifies the target and removes the guesswork.  Effective approaches include:

• Front-loading the reading focus before students engage with the text.  (“Today we’re reading to understand how the author builds their argument.”)

• Using one anchoring question that guides attention across the reading.  This helps students track meaning without juggling multiple demands.

• Revisiting the purpose mid-task.  A quick verbal reset (“Remember, we’re looking for...”) keeps processing aligned.

2. Reduced Cognitive Load

Special education students are often managing reading on top of processing needs, attention challenges, language demands, and executive-functioning load.  If the task design itself requires too many simultaneous steps, the student’s cognitive bandwidth gets spent before comprehension even begins.

Strategies That Reduce Cognitive Overload

These strategies make the task manageable without diluting the thinking:

• Intentional text chunking by meaning:  Breaks are placed where ideas naturally shift — not every few lines.

• Limiting competing tasks:  Students aren’t decoding, annotating, highlighting, and responding all at once.

• Providing structure before details:  Such as previewing the layout or sequence so students know where the reading is headed.

• Embedding visuals or diagrams:  Only when they clarify meaning, not as decorative noise.

3. Thinking Made Visible

Most of comprehension happens in the mind — which means struggling readers rarely see the process they’re supposed to follow. SPED students, in particular, benefit from seeing the mental moves that expert readers make: how they handle confusion, how they track structure, how they draw meaning from text features.

Strategies That Make Thinking Visible

This is where the invisible work becomes teachable.  Try:

• Short, precise think-alouds:  Focused on one mental move:  noticing a contradiction, identifying a clue, monitoring confusion.

• Sentence frames for reasoning:  These support students in articulating thinking they already have but can’t yet access verbally.

• Modeling how to repair meaning:  (“When this sentence doesn’t make sense, here’s what I do next…”)

4. Language Supports That Give Access (Not Simplification)

Many special education students can think at a higher level than they can express. They need scaffolds that give them entry into academic language — not simplified tasks that lower expectations.  The goal is access, not reduction.

Strategies That Provide Language Access

These supports strengthen comprehension without lowering expectations:

• Pre-teaching discipline-specific vocabulary using student-friendly definitions

• Providing structural supports, like frames for claims or explanations

• Using graphic organizers that reveal thinking, not fill-in-the-blank worksheets

5. Multiple Entry Points Into Meaning

Some students access text through structure, others through visuals, others through discussion or modeling.  Offering more than one way to enter the comprehension process ensures students don’t hit a wall the moment one pathway breaks down.

Strategies That Offer Multiple Entry Points

Different brains process meaning differently. Strong SPED instruction reflects that.

Leaders can encourage the use of:

• Paired talk or guided discussion to co-construct meaning

• Manipulatives, diagrams, or models in science and math texts

• Storyboarding or sequencing for narrative comprehension

• Previewing text structure (cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast)

For leaders, these conditions become the lens:  Are your strategies matching what comprehension actually requires for SPED learners?

Because when these five conditions and aligned strategies work together, SPED students aren’t just decoding text — they’re finally understanding it.

How These Reading Comprehension Strategies Fit Into MTSS and IEP Planning

Reading comprehension support shouldn’t live in isolation — and it absolutely shouldn’t rely on individual teacher choices. These strategies fit directly inside a well-functioning MTSS system and should map cleanly onto a student’s IEP and service delivery.

The goal is alignment: the same cognitive conditions supported at Tier 1 should be strengthened and intensified, not reinvented, as students move through the tiers.

Tier 1: Universal Access

At the universal level, all students — including SPED students — should see:

• purpose-setting routines woven into instruction

• consistent modeling of thinking

• predictable structures across classrooms

• reduced overload in task design

When Tier 1 is predictable and accessible, SPED students don’t spend all their energy “catching up” just to enter the task.

Tier 2: Targeted Instruction

Tier 2 simply tightens the focus:

• small-group reteaching of comprehension routines

• guided practice with specific thinking moves

• additional modeling and verbal scaffolds

Tier 2 is not new strategies — it’s intensified access.

Tier 3: Intensive Support

At Tier 3, the work becomes precise and individualized:

• scaffolds targeted to a specific breakdown in the comprehension process

• individualized reading comprehension goals

• high-frequency feedback loops

• documentation of which strategies actually move the needle

And remember — accommodations create access; instruction creates comprehension.  Students with disabilities need both, consistently and intentionally.

→ For a deeper look at how tiered systems function across behavior and academics, check out MTSS Behavior Interventions in Action: What Tiered Behavior Support Looks Like in Schools — it expands on the same system-level thinking leaders need here.

What Leaders and SPED Teams Should Look For in Classrooms

When you walk into a classroom, you’re not just looking for compliance or “strategy use.” You’re looking for evidence that the cognitive conditions for comprehension are actually being met.

Look for:

• teachers naming a clear purpose before reading

• students engaging with meaning, not just completing tasks

• modeling happening in short, digestible chunks

• visual supports tied directly to comprehension

• tasks that reflect the thinking the text requires

• students explaining their thinking in their own words

Here’s the simplest litmus test:  If comprehension instruction looks like “try this strategy,” it’s not aligned.  If it looks like “here’s how I think through this,” you’re on the right track.

This shift — from “doing strategies” to “making thinking visible” — is where comprehension truly begins to change for SPED learners.

→ And if you’re noticing that your SPED teachers are stretched thin while trying to meet these demands, you may find Teacher Burnout in Special Education: Why It’s Worse—and How We Can Help especially relevant. Strengthening comprehension instruction starts with strengthening the people delivering it.

Reading Comprehension Strategies for Special Education Students

Special education students don’t need watered-down texts or generic worksheets.  They need instruction that is intentional, accessible, and cognitively aligned.

When leaders and SPED teams help teachers:

• reduce cognitive load

• model the invisible thinking

• clarify purpose

• build language access

• and align tasks to meaning-making

Students finally get what they’ve needed all along: a clear path into the text — and the chance to understand it deeply.

This is how comprehension support stops being an intervention and starts becoming an equity practice. When SPED students can finally access what they’re being asked to comprehend, they move from “trying to get through the reading” to actually thinking with it.

And that shift — instructional precision paired with true accessibility — is what transforms special education classrooms and accelerates learning in powerful, lasting ways.

👉 Want done-for-you professional development tools and continued access to time-saving resources each month?  That’s exactly what you get inside our Behind the Desk membership, designed to make your lives easier.