This study investigated the effectiveness of direct instruction, in the form of anaphoric cues, on text comprehension skills and pronoun identification skills for ten elementary grade children with autism. A pretest-posttest matched control group design was utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of a ten week reading program on a sample of poor comprehenders, classified as having autism. The study examined the influence of the program between and within groups. It was hypothesized that providing anaphoric cues would increase pronoun identification skills, improve the ability to answer "wh" questions correctly, and improve reading comprehension. It was also hypothesized that the gradual removal of the verbal prompt, would not affect the ability to answer "wh" questions correctly.

The program included bi weekly reading sessions that required students to read sentences and answer "wh" questions. Participants in the intervention group were provided anaphoric cues, during each session. While the control group read the same sentences and answered the same questions, they were not provided any cues. Anaphoric cues consisted of an anaphoric question and textual prompts provided during a reading session, to help the reader identify the correct pronoun referent. Paired t-tests were computed and indicated statistically significant improvement in the ability to answer "wh" questions correctly for students provided cues from baseline to week 10. Standardized instruments found significant improvement in reading comprehension for the intervention group from pre to post intervention. The ability to answer "wh" questions correctly was maintained, after the gradual removal of the verbal prompt. Statistical significant improvement was not found in the ability to identify pronouns for neither the experimental or control group.