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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.
