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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.
Candace Cortiella: We frequently hear from parents that they are told by school people that the school doesn’t think it’s wise to give students a lot of assistive technology because it will take away the student’s incentive to learn. Does that argument makes sense to you as the AT expert?
Dave Edyburn: Yes, and it also makes sense to me as an educator, but really the unspoken part of that question is about fairness. On the issue of fairness, the research is pretty clear that most of us adults were arrested at the kindergarten level where fairness means we all get the same.
Then we understand [as adults] that fairness is when we get what we need. I think the misuse of some of this has been that we’re fearful of giving a child a tool because when will they learn it? And if we make it too easy then they will remove the motivation incentive to learn the challenging material.
And yet, I think the essence of the disability (and particularly as we look over an academic disability) is its persistent failure. The federal law about assistive technology is pretty clear. It’s that when I’m having a performance problem, then that means academic failure. The question I raise is: “How much failure data do we need till we know the student can’t do it?” That should be the trigger for the assistive technology evaluation because it says, “What are we going to do about that?”
Historically, as special educators, the only tools we’ve had are kind of the new teaching because nobody taught you this topic before, or remediation and somebody tried to teach you before and you didn’t get it well so you need to redo it. That pattern of failure continues to go throughout a child’s academic career. And I think this whole assistive technology notion of how do we break that cycle of failure to find the tools and conditions and strategies where you can do the task.
And to my way of thinking, until we find one way that you can do it, the fairness question doesn’t come into it because it’s an equity question. We would have to find some way that you can gain access to that because if you can’t gain access to that curriculum or task, you’re not going to be able to do what we need you to be able to do.
Fairness takes on a twisted perspective here. We sometimes use this argument as a way of saying, “Well, how will this be fair if you can use a tool when we have other students who are going to use their raw brain cells to do it. It’s not fair to them.” The reply to that is, “No, if they can do that without an aid, then that’s the way they should be doing it. But if we have evidence that you can’t do that under any condition, we need to start looking for technology tools that will support your performance so you can do it at least under some conditions.”
Candace Cortiella: This brings up a question that takes on another side of this discussion which is: How do parents guard against too much accommodation through assistive technology versus the remediation a student may need through an intensive and individualized instruction?
Dave Edyburn: I think that’s the million dollar question, and often it’s implicit in our conversations and it really needs to be explicit. In my work, I’ve talked about making that an explicit question at the IEP team meeting and that we consider it like a teeter-totter. You pose it that one side of the teeter-totter is instruction remediation and the other side of the teeter-totter is accommodation with assistive technology — that we’ve modified the tasks such that we support you with a tool to overcome that parts that you can’t do.
Right now, we don’t have research on how to balance that teeter-totter. We know that if we spend 100% time in instruction and remediation, that’s awesome. But we also know that we have kids in middle school and high school who’ve been doing that, and they still can’t do the task.
So the question I’d ask the team is, “How do we rebalance the teeter-totter? Is it 90% instruction and remediation and 10% compensation? Or 80-20?” We don’t know. But I think when we put that on the table, we have to be sensitive to not breaking the child’s spirit because let’s say we’re talking about a child that can’t read, if we continue to do about 100% instruction in phonics and remedial work and it’s not working, at what point does that child internalize the lesson to say, “It’s not only I cannot read, I can’t learn.” How do we provide the appropriate reading assistive technologies? And for what percentage of time? I think it’s a different teeter-totter balance in fourth grade versus ninth grade.
And I think the major decision for the IEP team is to balance that so the child is getting some support and is experiencing some success and is able to do the tasks we need him to do. I think in reading, that access skill of decoding, we continue to trip up children. But the second half of the definition of reading is comprehension — how to use and understand that information. If we haven’t been able to teach the child to be an independent reader by Grade 4, then at what point do we bring in the reading machine that scans and reads to the child so that he or she can get the fourth grade content and move on.
So in my work I have found the notion of the teeter-totter to be helpful in terms of balancing the equation of how much time and effort under remediation and instruction and how much time on compensation, so that we can get you to successfully complete the task. And I think it’s going to be balanced differently as the student moves through the K-12 grades. But again, I would say that’s a critical question and decision for the IEP team.
Candace Cortiella: So it will vary both by the intensity of the content or the challenge of the content from grade to grade as well as individually by student needs?
Dave Edyburn: Yes, I think so. [Another factor is] the student history of how much failure, and what have we done [to help]? We probably don’t want to jump to compensation for a second grade reader who’s struggling, but certainly for ninth grade readers, it should be a very different answer.
And hopefully along the way, we’ve made some minor adjustments so that the child is still able to access and engage and get some information from text that, left of his own devices, he wouldn’t be able to access.
Candace Cortiella: So, we’ve been hearing a lot recently about something called Universal Design for Learning, or UDL for short. Can you help our listeners understand the difference between UDL and AT?
Dave Edyburn: Wow, that’s a very timely question. I would say assistive technology has been dispensed on an individual basis. The child has to fail, somebody has to notice and make a referral. We do an interdisciplinary evaluation and try to make some recommendations about appropriate AT might be to help that child. We might actually purchase something and use it.
And all the while, the child has been moving on. The classes are going on and [he’s experienced] more failure, and this whole process has been a distraction in the sense that the school goes on. Because of this, AT is really designed for a low-incidence population. So I’ve been very critical of this model in terms of saying, “We need a different approach for high-incidence disabilities like learning disabilities because it’s not just one child like that in the school. There are a hundred.” And so that model doesn’t scale.
And so, about ten years ago, there came about a concept advanced of what you call Universal Design for Learning and what this involves is understanding diversity. Rather than letting children come in to my classroom and fail, I plan for those differences before they walk in the door. I don’t know who’s coming through the door next hour but I know that some kids don’t read at grade level, some kids struggle with writing. So the question becomes, “How can I make the classroom different, both the environment and the instructional materials, to support those diverse learners?”
The goal is not only to reach the students who I know have disabilities but to reach another group of students who don’t often get a lot of help, and who struggle on tasks. But [they] don’t struggle to the extent we make a referral.
So it’s kind of a different paradigm between these two ideas. The assistive technology is reactive. You have to wait till [the student has] a performance problem and they’ll try and get you an individualized solution. Universal Design for Learning is a proactive approach to the question, “How do I understand differences [among students] to make the curriculum and the classroom different before they get here?” And hopefully, by embedding the support, I made it more acceptable for you to use them, but I’m also helping other students who would likely struggle, but I didn’t know and it would take a while for me to know.
And so UDL is a very exciting paradigm, a difference, and a shake up for us. There are a lot of questions about the relationship between UDL and AT? Are we really giving up assistive technology? If I do Universal Design for Learning, does that mean nobody needs assistive technology? I don’t think that’s the case, but sometimes that gets lost in the translation.
But personally, I’m very hopeful that the UDL model will help us serve us high-incidence disabilities like learning disabilities much better because we know [students’] characteristics and can provide those supports from the classroom and make them available to everyone, which will help many students because they’re [delivered] proactively, we’re not going to give kids the time to fail.
