The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) emphasizes the teaching of social studies to provide students with information, critical thinking skills, and experiences to allow them to grow into responsible and effective citizens. In the past more attention was given to creating central standards in the area of social studies (National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, 2010). There has been very little research in academic skill acquisition for students with developmental disabilities (Browder et al., 2006). There were no studies found that addressed social studies instruction for student with developmental disabilities. One of the barriers to teaching social studies to students without and with disabilities is students' ability to read and understand written expository text. This current study investigated the use of specific vocabulary of social studies instruction to teach middle school students with autism to use a modified graphic organizer procedure to promote improved expository text comprehension in social studies topic area of United States History. Three students were instructed to use a modified graphic organizer intervention to answer nine items from self-read history passages. Results indicated that each of the three students increased their ability to independently respond to the nine items on the graphic organizer.