COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: TECHNOLOGY IN THE WORKS
Presenter(s)
Tracy Gray
American Institutes for Research
1000 Thomas Jefferson St NW
Washington DC 20007
Day Phone: 202 403 6841
Fax: 202 403 5454
Email: tgray@air.org
Presenter #2
Heidi Silver-Pacuilla
American Institutes for Research
1000 Thomas Jefferson St. NW
Washington DC 20007
Day Phone: 202 403 5218
Fax: 202 403 5454
Email: hsilver-pacuilla@air.org
Five award teams from a research competition to generate collaborative
research, sponsored by NCTI, will showcase findings as well as the process of
collaboration.
The
The assistive technology field is challenged by current educational policy
to show more—and increasingly more rigorous— evaluation data on the
effectiveness of devices and materials for students with disabilities.
Stakeholder groups are hard-pressed to achieve such evaluation data on their
own. Collaboration between developers, researchers, and user groups is the key
to generating this data in a timely and unbiased manner.
In May 2005, NCTI announced a new competition for collaborative research on
assistive and instructional technology. This competition was for short-term
(six month) evaluation and usability-type research conducted by
researcher-vendor partners. Matching funds of $15,000 and plans for shared
commitment had to be secured as part of the proposal. The purpose of the effort
is to foster collaborative research that will test the effectiveness of
technology products in improving learning outcomes for K-12 students with
disabilities.
In addition to fostering urgently needed evidence on the effectiveness of
AT, NCTI sought with this competition to study collaborations. Awardees agreed
to be interviewed by NCTI during their research and following the project,
specifically about the process of collaboration. Projects are to be completed
by February 2006, making CSUN a perfect venue for sharing the findings.
We awarded the following five proposals and will coordinate with research
teams to have as many of the awardees as possible present their own findings;
the research of teams that cannot attend will be presented by NCTI staff.
1. Bridge Builder: This project plans to field test the alpha version of
the Bridge Builder, an accessible web page authoring tool, in a school with
students with visual impairments. This setting will allow for multiple
teachers, including those with typical sight and those with visual impairments,
to use the software to create web sites for their classrooms, school projects,
or other school based purposes, and will allow for a variety of students to
access the web pages created by their teachers. The quasi-experimental
information about the ease of use of the Bridge Builder by people with and
without visual impairments will be gathered. The created web pages will be
evaluated on their inclusion of components, ease of use, and aesthetic
appearance. Students with visual impairments will be asked to find specific
information on the web pages to determine the accessibility of the created
pages by the intended audience. The research will provide information that will
be incorporated into the beta version of the product.
2. Mathematical Automaticity for Students with Disabilities: This targeted
research effort is part of a larger collaboration: Number Concepts and
Automaticity. The larger project addresses the thirty-five percent of
elementary students who are falling behind in math achievement. This specific
effort addresses the smaller group of students with physical, cognitive, and
emotional impairments who are often excluded from quality mathematics
instruction. This study will employ a single subject design as the purpose is
to analyze individual responses to a stimulus and determine the capability of
the software to track responses. Comparisons will be made between observer data
and computer data to determine the reliability of the software and the data it
generates. The results of this work will be incorporated in the IntelliTools
Classroom Suite and IntelliMathics, software published by IntelliTools.
3. Project SOLO™: Project SOLO™ will use a quasi-experimental pre-and
post-test group design to investigate the additive benefits of SOLO™ software
and ready-made assignments for SOLO™ software to self-regulated strategy
instruction. Teachers and their students will be randomly assigned to three
groups. All teachers will use a self-regulated strategy instructional framework
three times a week for forty-five minutes for a total of six weeks. All
teachers will follow the same six stages of the intervention; however, students
in the self-regulated strategy instruction plus SOLO™ without ready-made
assignments condition will engage in writing using the SOLO™ assignments they
create with their teachers. The students in the self-regulated strategy
instruction plus SOLO™ with ready-made assignments will write using the
assignments that are created by the research team. A mixed model analysis of
variance and a general linear model repeated factors measure will be used to
test the hypotheses.
4. SOLO™ and Access to General Education Curriculum: This project will
investigate the educational outcomes of SOLO™ from Don Johnston Inc. as a
support to writing interventions designed to increase access to the general
education curriculum with students with learning and academic disabilities.
Cohorts of teachers at each of three levels who have previously received
training in the use of portable keyboarding devices, voice output, word
prediction and/or text-to-speech reading software will receive training in the
use of the integrated SOLO software. These teachers will also receive
instruction in the use of a systematic set of writing outcome measures. The
effectiveness of the assistive technology product will be evaluated using a
quasi-experimental Concurrent Time Series Measurement design, in which specific
writing samples will be collected both with and without the support of the
assistive technology (concurrent measures) and with sampling repeated over time
(time series). Each student will serve as his/her own control with comparisons
of AT-supported and non-supported writing being examined over time. In
addition, data will be collected regarding both teacher and student attitude
and feedback concerning the use of the SOLO product.
5. The Signing Science Dictionary Research Study: TERC, in collaboration
with Vcom3D, will conduct a formative evaluation of their 300-term prototype
interactive 3D signing science dictionary. Students in grades 4-8 who are
deaf/hard-of-hearing and whose first language is sign will complete a unit
about weather using the dictionary. The study will examine the causal
relationship between use of the dictionary and students’ ability to work and
read independently and to master the science content. Findings will contribute
to the research basis needed for development and rigorous field testing of a
more robust signing science dictionary in elementary and middle-grade
classrooms. Six schools for the deaf with the requisite technology have been
recruited. During a period prior to using the dictionary, teachers will track
each student’s ability to read and work independently. These baseline data will
be compared with assessments of the students while using the dictionary and
with the student’s responses on a post-unit questionnaire. Use of the
dictionary will then be stopped for a period and second baseline measurements
taken, followed by a second period of dictionary use. Additional instruments
will include teacher pre- and post-unit surveys. Comparisons will also be made
with pre- and post-unit learning outcomes for the target population who
completed a signed version of the unit and with those of hearing students who
completed an unsigned version.
The final fifteen minutes of the presentation will be open for discussion
with the audience to engage in a discussion of the research findings as well as
a discussion of the processes of collaboration.
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