NCTI Technology in the Works Abstracts

2005 Collaborative Short Term Competition

2005 Technology in the Works Awardees

Bridge Builder

Matthew Kaplowitz, Founding Partner and Director of Technology and Content Innovation, Bridge Multimedia (vendor) with Wendy K. Sapp, Ph.D., Consultant, Visual Impairment Education Services (researcher)

The Bridge Builder provides a user friendly platform through which anyone with minimal computer knowledge can build an accessible educational web pages and websites. The Bridge Builder is completely 508 compliant as are the web pages created by its users. Through accessing these websites, children with visual impairments will be able to more fully participate in all aspects of the school community. Additionally, it will allow teachers who are visually impaired to independently build and manage their own educational web pages and web sites.

The project plans to field test the alpha version of the Bridge Builder 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.

Mathematical Automaticity for Students with Disabilities

Arjan S. Khalsa, Chief Executive Officer, IntelliTools, Inc. (vendor) and Edward J. Murphy, Chief Technology Officer, IntelliTools, Inc. (vendor) with David J. Chard, Ph.D., University of Oregon (researcher)

IntelliTools and Dr. David Chard intend to work together to research a new capability in mathematics instruction for students with significant disabilities. The plan is to create a method for assessing automaticity in students with disabilities and then delivering appropriate software interventions to expand the student’s capabilities.

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.

Research will be conducted with a group of ten to twenty students with significant disabilities in school districts in the Phoenix, AZ area. 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. The results will also play a significant role in further research and development processes, including a Phase II SBIR (NICHD/NIH) grant submission.

Project SOLO™

Karen A. Erickson, Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (researcher) with Don Johnston, Inc. (vendor)

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. Six middle-grades teachers and 32 of their students with and without disabilities who struggle with writing will be recruited. Teachers and their students will be randomly assigned to three groups: (1) self-regulated strategy instruction only; (2) self-regulated strategy instruction plus SOLO™ without ready-made assignments; and (3) self-regulated strategy instruction plus SOLO™ with ready-made assignments.

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.

The hypotheses to be tested in the study are: (1) All subjects, independent of group membership will show a significant increase in their written language abilities as a result of self-regulated strategy instruction with and without SOLO™; (2) There will be a significant difference between groups for all written language abilities as a result of self-regulated strategy instruction with and without SOLO™; and (3) There will be a significant difference between groups for writing attitudes as a result of self-regulated strategy instruction with and without SOLO™. A mixed model analysis of variance and a general linear model repeated factors measure will be used to test the hypotheses.

SOLO™ and Access to General Education Curriculum

George R. Peterson-Karlan, Ph.D., Illinois State University (researcher) and Howard R. Parette, Ed.D., Illinois State University (researcher) with Don Johnston, Inc. (vendor), and Sheri Piercy, Director of Special Education for Tri-County Special Education Association and Chair of HILIA Professional Development Committee

The 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 (intermediate elementary, middle school, and high school) who have previously received training in the use of portable keyboarding devices, voice output, word prediction and/or text-to-speech reading software through a recently completed State Improvement Grant from the Illinois State Board of Education 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 outcome measures will provide for classroom-based evaluation of the effects of assistive technology upon students’ abilities to complete key aspects of the writing process. Writing outcome measures will include engagement in and attitude toward writing; and quantity, quality and accuracy of writing samples. Of interest are the students’ abilities to write across the range of tasks related to the general education curriculum at their grade level.

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.

The Signing Science Dictionary Research Study

Judy Vesel, B.Ed., TERC (researcher) with Edward M. Sims, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer, Vcom3D, Inc. (vendor) and Arthur C. Johnson, Ph.D., EduMetrics (researcher)

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.

This animated interactive viewer—the SignSmith™ Player—allows users to select from a range of characters with different personalities and facial expressions; to sign a selected word, its definition, or part of speech; to sign in ASL or Signed English, and fingerspell; and to adjust the speed of signing.

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.