Technology Tools for Students With Autism

Katharina Boser, Matthew Goodwin, Sarah Wayland, Katharina Boser, Matthew Goodwin, Sarah Wayland

• Verlag: Brookes Publishing
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781598575538
• Thema: Psychologie
• Thema: Autismus-Spektrum-Störungen

Technology holds great promise for helping students with autism learn, communicate, and function effectively in the modern world. Start leveraging that power today with this forward-thinking book, your in-depth guided tour of technologies that support learners with autism and help them fully participate in their classroom and community. You'll learn about readily available technologies you can use right now—from apps to video modeling—and explore next-wave innovations that will help shape the future of autism intervention, such as therapeutic robots and advanced virtual reality technologies. You'll also get critical guidance on how to select the appropriate technology for your needs, weave technology into a universal design for learning framework, and conduct effective professional development so teachers make the most of new tools and strategies.

DISCOVER TECHNOLOGIES THAT HELP

• support the overall learning of children on the autism spectrum
• teach social skills and support emotion regulation through independent data collection
• develop executive function strategies and improve flexibility, memory, and transitions
• boost literacy and language skills
• support young adults' transition to the workplace
• make data collection and program evaluation more effective and efficient
• strengthen teacher training programs
• enhance use of evidence-based practices

Explore the benefits of technologies like

• apps for education, communication, behavior regulation, and more
• video modeling
• language processing software
• customized digital stories and book creator apps
• element cue supports
• emotional regulation and sensing technologies
• interactive learning software to improve feedback and metacognition
• visualization and mind mapping apps
• text-to-speech and speech to text software
• e-readers and tablets with integrated multimedia (e.g., cameras, microphones, etc.)
• electronic data collection forms for use with handheld devices
• and more

SECTION
III

Language Tools

Sarah C. Wayland

In this section, three chapters describe how to teach language skills to children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). They also describe some tools that can be helpful in accommodations. This is an area where the research base targeting students with autism is quite limited. For this reason, chapter authors in this section have taken the approach of describing the challenges associated with language skills in autism and reporting on technological interventions that target those challenges. They describe the different styles of interventions and curricula used by each app so that you can match the communication deficits of an individual child with the appropriate software.

In their chapter, “Language Software for Teaching Semantics, Grammar, and Pragmatics to Students with Autism,” Katharine P. Beals and Felicia Hurewitz give an overview of some of the currently available language software specifically designed to remediate missing skills in vocabulary and semantics, grammar, and sentence-level semantics and pragmatics. They compare software programs by describing which skills the software teaches (comprehension or production of vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics), the method for teaching the skill, type of feedback, and how they track progress. They end their chapter by describing methods for assessing whether the skills are generalizing more broadly.

The next chapter, “Mobile Media Devices: A Paradigm Shift in Assistive Technology for Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” by Jessica Gosnell Caron and Howard C. Shane, examines how recent advances in mobile media technologies can facilitate communication for persons with ASDs. They evaluate apps that improve comprehension through the use of visual cues (visual instructional mode, or VIM), enhance expressive communication with visual supports (visual expression mode, or VEM), or use visuals to schedule and organize (visual organization mode, or VOM). They evaluate apps using a feature description grid with the following categories: purpose (VIM, VEM, VOM), speech output, speech settings, representation (user interface features), display settings, feedback features, rate enhancement (how to control rate of presentation), access (how the user interacts with the device), required motor competencies, support, and miscellaneous other features. They also describe how the software allows the user to customize the above features.

The final chapter, “Technology to Support Literacy in Autism,” by Sarah C. Wayland, Katharina I. Boser, and Joan L. Green, describes tools that can help students develop and augment literacy skills. The focus is on six literacy skills: alphabetics, vocabulary, text comprehension, fluency, spelling, and writing. The first part of each section describes research-based approaches to teaching the missing skills, as well as effective accommodations. The second part of each section focuses on technologies and applications that can be used to help with the skill. Although students with autism can also have dyslexia and dysgraphia, there are some cognitive skills (e.g., understanding that words can have more than one meaning or understanding character motivations) that are especially common in students with ASDs. This chapter devotes particular attention to technology that can help remediate these skills.

It is important to understand that language skills are complex and interrelated; for this reason, we advise the reader to consider all three chapters when designing an appropriate intervention.

CHAPTER
6

Language Software for Teaching Semantics, Grammar, and Pragmatics to Students with Autism

Katharine P. Beals and Felicia Hurewitz

Communicative impairment is a core component of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), often persisting throughout the life span (Howlin, Goode, Hutton, & Rutter, 2004). Improvements in language functionality may enhance educational inclusion, expand social networks, improve academic achievement, and ultimately, increase employment and independence. Many studies demonstrate that a variety of language skills respond to remediation if the intervention is intensive, tailored to the baseline level of the individual, based on sound principles of learning and development, and generalizable to new situations (Rogers, 2006). In principle, such structured teaching is modality neutral, deliverable via software as well as via direct interpersonal instruction. This chapter provides an overview of some of the currently available language software that is specifically designed for individuals with autism or similar language impairments.

Advantages of language remediation software include availability and convenience, especially for serving children who may otherwise not receive language services. Most children diagnosed with autism, including the “best outcome” population who eventually lose the diagnosis, continue to have residual language issues (Kelley, Paul, Fein, & Naigles, 2006). Intensive language instruction may not be as available to older children as it is to younger children, and the linguistic needs of the more linguistically capable children may fly under the radar. Opportunities for regular, individualized speech instruction may be limited by parental or school resources, time restrictions, or a desire not to pull a child from regular education or recreational opportunities. Computerized instruction, in contrast, is limited neither by time nor by location, allowing for a consistent methodology across home and school. Furthermore, several studies suggest that children with autism may be as or more motivated during technology-based interventions as they are during interpersonal instruction (Moore & Calvert, 2000; Williams, Wright, Callaghan, & Coughlan, 2002).

In this chapter we summarize some of the currently published linguistic software interventions that have been created specifically to address the needs of children with autism. As we will see, these programs offer a variety of teaching methodologies and target a variety of skills. Although there is emerging evidence that such programs can provide educational benefit (Hurewitz & Beals, 2008; Ramdoss et al., 2011; Whalen et al., 2010; Wilson, Fox, & Pascoe, 2009), none of the software packages described here qualifies as fully “evidence based” when evaluated by rigorous scientific standards (Young, Corea, Kimani, & Mandell, 2010). Our purpose is not to endorse some programs and criticize others but, rather, to describe the curricula and teaching protocols of each of the programs so that teachers of children with ASDs can, in the absence of rigorous scientific guidance, choose judiciously among the programs, matching particular communication deficits to particular intervention styles and curriculum packages.

LEVELS OF LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

Language is a complex skill set, including procedural, rule-based, and social components, which may overlap in presentation on a general assessment of communicative functioning. Numerous case studies suggest that specific, targeted areas of language acquisition can be taught on an individual basis. Vocabulary (i.e., receptive and productive lexical knowledge) is the most readily instructed area of language and possibly the most responsive to intervention (Bosseler & Massaro, 2003; Hurewitz & Boser, 2010; Whalen et al., 2010). Less obviously remediable are syntax (the ordering and structural relation of words in a sentence), and morphology (the use of prefixes and suffixes to confer grammatical structure and to expand vocabulary). Although a few studies suggest that computerized intervention improves syntax skills (Dressler, 2011; Finn, Futernick, & MacEachern, 2005; Hetzroni & Tannous, 2004; Wilson et al., 2009; Yamamoto & Miya, 1999), these are limited in sample size and assessment of generalization (Young et al., 2010). Perhaps the most recalcitrant aspect of language is linguistic pragmatics, which includes such diverse communicative areas as intonation, gesture, reference (appropriate use of pronouns and deictic phrases such as this and that), conversational interaction, and indirect speech (or communicative intent). There is very little research addressing the acquisition of pragmatics in typical children, and software programs typically cover only small chunks of pragmatics, such as making appropriate responses to questions or using pronouns in various contexts.

In spite of the dearth of efficacy studies for certain levels of language remediation, we believe that teachers can still optimize a child’s progress by matching his or her current level (as per formal assessments of need) to the language skills targeted by particular software programs. One of our goals here, therefore, is to describe which programs target which specific skills. For example, if a child with autism displays age-appropriate vocabulary, lagging instead in syntactic skills or pragmatics, use of a vocabulary acquisition software module cannot be expected to be productive. More generally, when choosing among vocabulary, syntax, or pragmatics modules, existing skills must be carefully assessed. Many language theorists believe that a child has to be ready to learn the particular construction or forms being instructed and that there is a natural order for this acquisition process (Krashen, 1982; Thomke & Boser, 2011). For example, research in typical language acqu...