Effects of Assistive Technology on Postsecondary Students with Learning Disabilities

Purpose

Students with learning disabilities constitute the fastest growing group of disabled students on college campuses. Despite the remediation efforts of elementary and secondary schools, many of these students graduate from high school with learning disab ilities largely unmitigated. Others, who have managed to compensate for their milder difficulties, often find their strategies hopelessly inadequate to the stringent demands of college. Most learning disabled students arrive on campus with bruised egos and a lifelong habit of avoiding certain activities, such as writing, that have proven especially arduous. The mandate to find effective and cost-efficient ways to help these students springs not only from the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act, but from every institution's responsibility to the students it accepts.

At California State University, Northridge, the Office of Disabled Students Services and the Computer Access Laboratory have a long history of collaboration in helping students to compensate for various disabilities and achieve academic success. This tradition of cooperation and compensation, added to the difficulties posed by remediation at the college level (it is too time-consuming and students find it humiliating), prompted the originators of this project to investigate the uses of computer technology in a compensatory rather than a remedial approach.

Many professionals who work with learning disabled students had long believed that technology could help these students with their reading and writing deficits. This project originated from the conviction that before the virtues of computer assistance to the learning disabled could be disseminated it was necessary to collect concrete evidence of their value.

Innovative Features

The project focused on three compensatory technologies:

• optical character recognition, which scans text from various sources such as books or handouts and converts it to a computer document;
• speech synthesis/screen review, which reads the computer document aloud using a synthesized voice while simultaneously highlighting the words on the screen; and
• speech recognition, which converts words spoken into a microphone into a relatively error-free text displayed on the computer screen.

In the first year of the project, staff trained 80 students to use the equipment, and then evaluated their performance with technology assistance, with traditional assistance (readers and transcribers), and with no assistance. In the two following years they investigated the effects of the technology on long-term retention and success. In the third year the costs of the technology assistance were analyzed and compared to the cost of personnel-intensive assistance.

The first year's work revealed writing to be the area in which learning disabled students needed the most improvement. Project staff responded to this problem by creating two mini- courses, entitled "Passing the Upper Division Writing Exam Using Technology," and "Writing a Term Paper Using Technology." Over the next two years, the mini-courses were taught to sixty learning disabled students.

Evaluation and Project Impact

The immediate effects of the technology on reading and writing were tested as follows:

1. Effects of optical character recognition/speech synthesis on reading comprehension. Students read the Formal Reading Inventory--a series of successively more difficult paragraphs followed by comprehension questions--under three conditions: silently, with no assistance; having a human reader read the selection aloud; and using optical character recognition in conjunction with speech synthesis to scan and read the passages and questions.

   The most deficient students performed better with the technology than with a human reader or with no assistance. The test showed that the more severe a student's deficiency, the more positive the technology's effects. In the case of more proficient readers, however, the technology inte rfered with comprehension. The investigators believe that converting text to auditory stimuli circumvents the decoding difficulties that severely learning disabled students exhibit.

2. Effects of speech synthesis/screen review on proofreading. Students wrote the first draft of an expository essay, then proofread their essay with each third of the piece being read under a different condition: with no assistance; having the section read aloud by a human reader; and using speech synthesis/screen review.

   Students found more errors overall when using the technology than when listening to a human reader or when reading without assistance. The multisensory presentation may help students to perceive errors in a text.

3. Effects of speech recognition technology on written composition. Students composed three 500-word essays under the following conditions: using speech recognition technology; dictating the essay to a transcriber; and with no assistance.

Under the "no assistance" and "transcriber" conditions, the distribution of scores of the learning disabled participants was significantly inferior to that of their non-disabled peers. When learning disabled students wrote with the help of speech recognition, however, their scores did not differ significantly from those of non-disabled students. Speech recognition allows students to produce text relatively free of the spelling and mechanical errors that often mar the writing of the learning disabled.

To gauge the long-term effects of assistive technology, the investigators surveyed the performance of students in classes with heavy reading and/or writing requirements. The grades of learning disabled students in these classes showed significant improvement, though not enough to raise the overall GPA significantly.

Assistive technology showed impressive effects on the performance of learning disabled students on the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination--95 percent passed, compared to 48 percent before the study, 52 percent for a matched group of learning disabled students who were not using the technology, and 75 percent for the non-disabled population.

Perhaps the most striking effect, however, was on retention: over three years, the drop-out rate for the 140 participants in the study was 1.4 percent, compared to 34 percent for the matched controls over the same period, and 48 percent for the non-disabled population over four years. Graduation rates also rose significantly for participants and differed significantly from those of their matched subjects.

Staff observations and questionnaire and test results testified to a growing independence on the part of students involved in the study--they relied less frequently on family, friends and services provided by the University. As they became more comfortable with the technology they generalized its use to employment and recreation situations. Many participants came to terms with their disability, and showed a significant increase in leadership, initiative and academic interest. Generally, students attributed their improvements to the use of the computer.

To judge the cost effectiveness of the technology (exclusive of the mini-courses), two estimates were prepared: a bare bones estimate based on equipment purchase, training and maintenance; and a moderately enhanced estimate which included some outreac h, needs assessment and provision for further training. Both estimates took into account the cost of increased computer use as revealed by the study. Both estimates were compared to the cost (including recruitment, training and salary) of providing comp arable services by personnel such as transcribers and readers: savings per student per semester were $310 for the bare bones estimate, and $234 for the moderately enhanced version.

In summary: all three technologies significantly alleviated difficulties in reading comprehension, proofreading and written composition; significantly improved long-term academic retention and success; positively influenced academic behaviors and att itudes; and were highly cost effective compared to other interventions.

Lessons Learned

Despite the positive results of using computers for reading and writing, not all students were helped, nor was the technology equally useful for all tasks. The investigators conclude that technology assistance should be prescribed only after careful evaluation of the individual student's strengths and needs.

Recognition

The project yielded a number of articles in major journals, presentations at national and international conferences, and several national and international workshops sponsored by the University's Center on Disabilities.

Available Information

Further information on the project, as well as copies of related journal articles, may be obtained from:

Harry Murphy
Eleanor Higgins
California State University, Northridge
Center on Disabilities
18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, CA 91330
818-885-2869

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