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The following is a transcription of the podcast, “Assistive Technology: Getting the Right Supports for Your Student (Audio).”
In this NCLD podcast, Candace Cortiella interviews Dr. Dave Edyburn, a leading expert in assistive technology (AT) for students with disabilities. Dr. Edyburn is the founder and editor of Special Education Technology Practice, a journal for technology practitioners, as well as many other products focused on using the power of technology in special education and to improve educational opportunities for children, youth, and adults with disabilities. He is also a professor in the Department of Exceptional Education at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
Candace Cortiella: Welcome, Dr. Edyburn. Can you give us a simple definition of assistive technology (AT)?
Dave Edyburn: That’s a great place to start. And simple would be good, in the sense that we would know it and recognize it when we see it. Almost all of our work is traced back to the late 1980s and the federal definition of assistive technology which talks about devices that improve, maintain, or increase the functional capabilities of an individual with a disability.
The challenge for that is that the core definition now is anything that enhances performance. So that makes it a little difficult in terms of looking at a product or an intervention to say, “Is that really an assistive technology?”
Candace Cortiella: What are some of the most common AT supports used to help students with learning disabilities?
Dave Edyburn: Well, there are many things that could be used, and I think that’s part of what we probably want to talk about today is that students with learning disabilities struggle in many areas. Some common areas would be obviously reading and math, but other issues are things like memory and writing and strategies in terms of how to go about completing schoolwork.
So even though the challenges of learning disabilities are well-known, the connections between appropriate assistive technologies are not as well-known. And so, in many schools we’ll be struggling with [questions such as], “Well, do they need a special word processor because the word processor they are using now doesn’t pick up some of the gross misspellings. If so, what kind of spelling-correction technologies are available?”
So we would hope the basic things like calculators and word processors are provided. Again, all those would be considered assistive technologies, but sometimes they’re overlooked because all of us use tools like that. One of the challenges that we hear about is that “My student’s note-taking skills are so poor and [his] handwriting is so poor, can we do speech-to-text so that my child can just dictate and the computer can type it for him?”
So there’s a lot of hope with things like that as well as text-to-speech products which read [aloud] to a child. So I think [today] we’ll talk about the kind of specialized assessment that’s needed to find the right products.
Candace Cortiella: Last year, the National Center for Learning Disabilities released a report entitled, The State of Learning Disabilities 2009 . That report found significant shortfalls in AT use among students with LD. By some estimates, only 25 to 35% of students with LD are using any type of assistive technology to support their instruction. To what do you attribute this significant underutilization?
Dave Edyburn: That’s an interesting statistic because we don’t have good data on how many students are using assistive technology, particularly with mild disabilities, so they tend to be under-referred and have less than optimal utilization of some of these assistive technologies. And I think part of it is because we really haven’t been attending to the issue about how technology enhances cognition.
Historically, the field of assistive technology has been associated with overcoming physical limitations as well as sensory limitations. What I use as a starting point for our work on assistive technology for learning disabilities is the 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA). If you look at that, we’ve really been at this for less than 15 years and it’s my way of thinking from the evidence I’ve seen is that even though LD is a high-incidence disability, we’re not seeing anywhere near high-incidence use of specialized devices for reading, writing, math, and other ways kids struggle in school.
