Disciplinary literacy is a multidimensional, inquiry-driven construct that encompasses reading, investigating, reasoning, speaking, and writing within a discipline. In secondary education, reading shifts students from basic comprehension to evaluating, interpreting, and synthesizing texts like disciplinary experts. In English Language Arts (ELA), this includes forming evidence-based interpretations aligned with standards such as theme identification and citing textual evidence. Using a multiple-probe across participants design, this study examines the effects of CUT to the Message, a standards-aligned intervention embedded within the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) framework, on the reading comprehension and engagement of high school students with disabilities (SWD) reading below grade level. Reading comprehension is measured by a student’s ability to identify the narrative theme of a passage and cite textual evidence. The study also compared outcomes using AI-generated and traditional texts. Findings indicated improvements in engagement, strategic responding, theme identification, and evidence citation, establishing a functional relation between the intervention and reading comprehension performance. Results also revealed no meaningful differences in performance levels or student perceptions between text types. This study supports discipline-specific interventions and AI-generated materials as a promising, transferable tool for disciplinary literacy.
