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Candace Cortiella: What role does the school play in ensuring that students with LD get the AT they need to benefit from instruction?
Dave Edyburn: That’s a great question because the federal law [includes a] mandate for IEP teams to consider assistive technology. The operation of that is really at the IEP team level to say, “Look, this child is struggling. We’ve got plenty of evidence that he’s struggling in all these classes. We’re mandated to consider the kinds of assistive technologies that can help.” And that team is also charged with finding appropriate [AT] tools.
Unfortunately, the way it’s been implemented in most states is simply a “yes” or “no” check box [indicating] that assistive technology is being considered. Many teams will simply check “yes” because they thought about AT but [believe the student] doesn’t need it. So it’s somewhat of a denial of the fact that there is a learning problem and that there’s an associated technology that could lessen the impact of that and make the child more successful.
I refer to this as the “consideration paradox” because if teams are not trained and don’t have access to assistive technology evaluation and the types of tools that are out there, they don’t know what’s possible and so they tend to say, “Yes, we considered it, but we didn’t find anything relevant and we didn’t know if anything would be helpful. And we’re going to keep trying to teach and that will work itself out in the end.”
Candace Cortiella: What should parents do when the school doesn’t include a discussion of AT in that IEP process as required by special education law as you’ve just described to us?
Dave Edyburn: That’s a tough situation because suddenly, the relationship becomes adversarial. Often what parents are left to do is to go outside the school and find someone who would be able to help evaluate their child and find appropriate technology tools [and then] to come back to the team and say, “Here’s some evidence and we collected some data. When the child completed the task without technology and did a similar task with technology and did it on more than one occasion.” So we kind of graph these results. What we’re looking for when we graph it is see if there’s a boost, if performance can be better with a different device or tool, and bring that evidence back to the school to say, “Can we consider this?” And it’s been challenging. I’ve been doing more work in the area of advocacy, and it’s hard to get schools to change their perspective about how much support is appropriate.
And so one of the things I encourage parents to do is to continue to seek those tools and to remember that school is six hours a day. If we can find the right tool, certainly there’s no limit on how much it can be used outside of school. And I think that’s an important factor. It circumvents what we’re trying to do with the federal law about consideration and finding the appropriate tools.
But in some cases, it’s an uphill battle to try and change systems and to help educational teams that don’t know about the tools or haven’t been able to figure out how to integrate them or have access to the appropriate tools at the right time. It’s a challenging situation. I guess the short answer is there are no easy answers here other than being persistent.
Candace Cortiella: So is it important for students themselves to participate in the selection of the assistive technology that they’ll be using?
Dave Edyburn: I think so. There’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest that if we use an expert model and tell you what you need that there will be some abandonment, so it’s very important that we always involve the individual in the selection process and help him or her understand under which conditions they perform best.
Obviously we don’t want to pick a device based on its color. We really want to ask, “Does it help me? And which one helps me the most?” That really requires some [user] engagement but also some data collection so that we can compare, because many products are very similar once we get to a specific class of assistive technologies. And so we don’t want the decision be made based on price or color. But as students enter middle school and high school and post-secondary, a lot of what you see is, “What I’ll use and [will] not use will be influenced by my peers and how I’m perceived by my peers.” So I think in many cases we need to be very attentive to engaging the student in helping select the appropriate device and understand if it works for them and whether they’ll continue to use it.
