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Presenter(s)
Yeunjoo Lee, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Special Education
California State University, Bakersfield
Email: ylee@csub.edu
Kurt Keckly, M.A.
California State University, Bakersfield
Driving is an essential skill to live a high quality and productive life in the 21st century. (Bell, Young, & Salzberg, 1991). It is also critical to arrive at a place of employment and thus maintain competitive or supported employment. According to Hornby and Kidd (2001), effectiveness of a transition plan is evaluated by whether students with mild disabilities obtain and maintain successful employment. Students with disabilities have a greater chance of becoming unemployed than their peers without disabilities. According to a study (Fox & Wandry, 1998), 40 to 70 percent of individuals with disabilities are unemployed while 6 percent of their counterparts are unemployed. These unemployment rates confirm an earlier study by Wagner and Blackorby (1996) that only found 37 percent of young adults with mental retardation to be competitively employed three to five years after graduation. Driving skill increases the likelihood for employment, and is required for social integration and independence.
Driver education is typically delivered via traditional lecture style. With the current educational budget problem faced by most states' budget problem, it would be rare to provide hands-on driver education to students. One option is to use technology to bring the real life to a classroom. This presentation addresses two main questions of using a multimedia program for driving instruction. First, will the multimedia driving instruction (i.e., road signs and speed limits) be effective in teaching students with mild disabilities? Second, will the multimedia lesson be more effective than a non-multimedia lesson?
Participants
The participants were 24 high school students with mild disabilities in a Transition Planning and Placement (TPP) class at a rural high school. There were 17 male and seven female students who ranged in age from 17 to 19 years old. A total of 11 students have mild mental retardation, and 13 students are diagnosed of a specific learning disability. Among them, 20 students (83%) were Hispanic, migrant, and English language learners.
Lesson Development
The classroom teacher decided to develop multimedia traffic signs and speed limits lessons. First, the teacher used the state DMV Handbook (California Department of Motor Vehicle, 2002) to outline the topics following the order of information presented in the handbook. He also used the Federal Highway Administration's Standard Highway Signs (the United States Department of Transportation, 2002) in conjunction with the DMV Handbook to compile a list of common warning road signs.
After the lesson plan was developed, a list of desired pictures and video segments on traffic signs was created. The list included digital pictures of every common warning road sign and area governed by a special speed law. The speed limit video clips presented an example of what it feels to drive the common speed limits of 15, 25 and 65mph. Overall, over 250 digital pictures and 51 video clips were captured in the community. Among those, a few digital pictures and video clips were embedded in the Microsoft PowerPoint.
Data Collection Procedure
The teacher gave the pre and posttests on the multimedia and non-multimedia instruction. Pretest on road signs had 29, and posttest had 26 questions with three choices. The pretest on speed limits had 19, and posttest had 19 items. All tests were developed in Microsoft PowerPoint, and were printed with 6 slides on each page. Following the pre-test, instruction was delivered over nine class periods for road sign lesion and six class periods for speed limit lesson, one period per day. The students spent one period working on a computer independently after the completion of guided lessons. During the independent period, the students used a desktop computer to navigate the PowerPoint presentation at their own pace. When the lessons have been completed as a class, the teacher placed the PowerPoint presentations on the school server, allowing the students' access to the lessons from any computer on campus. Posttests were administered immediately following the independent lessons.
Non-Multimedia Instruction
The non-multimedia safe-driving practices instruction was delivered prior to the multimedia instruction through the DMV handbook. The direct instruction was supplemented with teacher-created worksheets that closely followed the text of the handbook. The students received a brief lecture to introduce the topic and daily drill and practice as a whole class. After the guided lesson, a game was introduced to review the content of the lesson. During the game, they were divided into two groups, and each group took turns trying to answer questions to earn points. The instruction was administered for ten school days, and posttests were administered at the end of the tenth day of instruction. Both the pre and posttest contained 25 questions.
Results
The students performed at an average of 45.2 percent correct responses with a range of 24 to 72 percent during pretests of road signs. Their responses improved to an average of 94.1 percent correct responses with a range of 77 to 100 percent during posttests.
The speed limit pre-test was administered in the same manner as the road sign pre-test. The speed limit pre-test results yielded an average score of 60.8 percent, ranged from 32 to 68 percent. The average score improved to 92.5 percent after the instruction, ranged from 79 to 100 percent. During the non-multimedia lesson, students improved an average of 47.4 percent to 66.7 percent correct on the posttest (See figure 1).
Discussion
The multimedia lessons were effective in teaching road signs and speed limits and produced higher levels of performance than non-multimedia instruction. While the students also improved after the non-multimedia instruction, the scores were not satisfactory and below a passing score (i.e., 83.3%) of the state DMV exam.
Multimedia lessons were effective, and anecdotal data also indicates increased level of the participants' interest during the lesson. The video segments bring the real situation into a classroom and increase the participants' understanding. While the participants were distracted by the novelty and the video segments at the beginning, the distractibility is subsumed as the lesson went on. The multimedia lesson is adaptable to various instructional settings. A lesson was saved in an individual computer for an independent review as in the current investigation. The multimedia program can also be delivered through peer tutoring (Bell et al., 1991), or sent to students' home. The flexibility and efficiency of multimedia lessons are also noticed by other researchers (Norman, Collins, & Schuster, 2001).
One noteworthy advantage of multimedia lesson is that it is a new way to provide simulation in classroom (Ayres & Langone, 2002). Video clips allow students to be immersed in natural environments with rich exemplars, and reduce the issues on safety, transportation, time, and supervision in community-based instruction. In particular, the video anchors in this study were collected from the students' neighborhood, which makes the lessons meaningful for them. Although the current study did not involve the real life training, literature supports the combination of simulation and in-vivo training (Branham, Collins, Schuster & Kleinert, 1999; Wissick et al., 1999).
Future research should be conducted to examine the effectiveness and generalization of the combined instruction on driver education. The multimedia lessons in the current investigation did not allow interaction to the users and was presented in a linear format. In future, the multimedia instruction with an interactive component can be developed and evaluated for the effectiveness.
References
Ayres, K. & Langone, J. (2002). Acquisition and generalization of purchasing skills using a video enhanced computer based instructional program. Journal of Special Education Technology, 17(4), 15-28.
Bell, K., Young, R., Salzberg, C., & West, R. (1991). High school driver education using peer tutors, direct instruction, and precision teaching. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 24, 45-51.
Branham, R. Collins, B., Schuster, J.W., & Kleinert, H. (1999). Teaching community skills to students with moderate disabilities: Comparing combined techniques of classroom simulation, videotape modeling, and community-based instruction. Education and Training in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 34, 170-181.
California Department of Motor Vehicles. (2002). California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Fox, R., & Wandry, D., (1998). School to adult life transitions for students with disabilities: forging a new alliance. Professional School Counseling, 1(4), 48-52.
Hornby, G., & Kidd, R., (2001). Transfer from special to mainstream - ten years later. British Journal of Special Education, 28, 10-17.
Norman, J., Collins, B., & Schuster, J. (2001). Using an instructional package including video technology to teach self-help skills to elementary students with mental disabilities. Journal of Special Education Technology, 16, 5-18.
Shearin, A., Roessler, R., & Schriner, K. (1999). Evaluating the transition component in IEPs of secondary students with disabilities. Rural Special Education Quarterly, 18(2), 22-36.
United States Department of Transportation. (2002). Federal Highway Administration's Standard Highway Signs.
Wagner, M. & Blackorby, J. (1996). Transition from high school to work or college: how special education students fare. Future of Children, 6(1), 103-120.
Wissick, C., Gardner, E., & Langone, J. (1999). Video-based simulations: Considerations for teaching students with developmental disabilities. Career Development for Exceptional Individuals, 22, 233-249.
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