Assistive Technology: Getting the Right Supports for Your Student

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.

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.

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.

Candace Cortiella: So the Universal Design for Learning movement actually has its roots in the universal design concept that was born in the field of architecture. Correct?

Dave Edyburn: Yes, that’s true.

Candace Cortiella: And that was again, as you said, to stop retrofitting buildings and public places in order to provide access for people with physical or sensory disabilities for example, and to build those accommodations into the architecture from the beginning.

Dave Edyburn: Yes. I mean the best examples of that that you mentioned are the curb cuts. That by providing those for everyone, it’s not just people with wheelchairs that can benefit, it’s kids on rollerblades and bicycles and parents with baby buggies and things -- that understanding disability and the special needs of a person with disability made a better design for everyone.

An example of sensory UDL is we have control panels on our computers that are built into the whole operating systems, so if you need the text enlarged because Grandma can’t read the email from her granddaughter, we can zoom the text on the whole screen to get it to a comfortable size.

And so the idea here is that as we start to understand and appreciate differences, we can make these supports available to everyone. Now it’s just a matter of knowing when I need it. How do I access it? How do I turn it on? Which again is probably a very good cost model in the sense that we’re doing it upfront so we’re not paying retrofitting cost later, which is not as satisfactory because it’s delayed, costlier, etc. That metaphor is very important as we think about curriculum and student performance.

Candace Cortiella: Is today’s high-tech world beginning to diminish the need for assistive technology, specifically for students with learning disabilities?

Dave Edyburn: That’s a very timely question as we think about how the world is changing around us. I think it goes back to the question about does assistive technology and Universal Design for Learning. My sense here is that traditional assistive technology may cause a stigma for students with learning disabilities because in middle school and secondary school, they don’t want to be different. So this individualized approach has never proven itself in the sense of being able to deliver timely interventions that help kids do the task we’re asking them to do in school.

So I think Universal Design for Learning has great promise in terms of trying to build in digital supports, both into the curriculum — and again we’re going to need to see more digital curriculum — but as we have these flexible learning environments, the digital supports would be available for everyone.

I think part of the challenge is things that were formally special [are now mainstream]. A good example is something called word prediction. When I type the letter T, the computer thinks I maybe spelling the word “the” as the most frequent “t” word. And so we would provide that on the screen and if that’s that word I want, I can press one key and it auto-completes.

Last fall, Google released a product like that where they have word prediction for everyone. And so now is that a special education product? Is that an assistive technology anymore because now Google has it and we can all use it? And I think that’s a very interesting challenge to our paradigm that assistive technology is special only for some while we have to engage in these very elaborate evaluation models to get you the right stuff as opposed to being supports built in much like we find in text messaging that uses word prediction on our cell phones.

So I think this is both the peril and the promise of what we’re talking about — that it requires us to have a very insightful [understanding] of where an individual struggles and then knowing how to build solutions that provide that support. And then it really doesn’t matter what we call it. The emphasis has to be on, “Can you do the task? Can we make this easier for you and make you more effective, save you time?”

I think parents would agree that this is not the experience they have when they try to help their child with homework. It’s difficult. It’s a battle. We don’t have the right tools. We’re constantly struggling. It’s not a positive experience. So I think that illustrates how much more we have to do in terms of trying to find the right tools, and get them to the right individuals, and get them to a point where they would be willing to engage in reading, writing — tasks that they normally find difficult and would like to avoid.

Candace Cortiella: Thank you for spending time with us to discuss this important area.

Dave Edyburn, Ph.D., is 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.

This transcription was made possible by a grant from the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation.