Effects of assistive technology for students with reading and writing disabilities

Abstract

Background: Assistive technology has been used to mitigate reading disabilities for almost three decades, and tablets with text-to-speech and speech-to-text apps have been introduced in recent years to scaffold reading and writing. Few scientifically rigorous studies, however, have investigated the benefits of this technology. Purpose: The aim was to explore the effects of assistive technology for students with severe reading disabilities. Method: This study included 149 participants. The intervention group received 24 sessions of assistive technology training, and the control group received treatment as usual. Results: Both the intervention and control groups improved as much in 1 year as the normed population did. However, gains did not differ between the groups directly after the intervention or at 1 year of follow-up. Conclusions: The use of assistive technology seems to have transfer effects on reading ability and to be supportive, especially for students with the most severe difficulties. In addition, it increases motivation for overall schoolwork. Our experience also highlights the obstacles involved in measuring the ability to assimilate and communicate text. ä IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONS Assistive technology (AT) can be useful for children with reading disabilities to assimilating text as well as boosting their reading. Children with reading disability using AT increased reading performance as much as a norm group, i.e. the students enhanced their reading ability despite no training in traditional reading remediation. Children's and adolescents' motivation for schoolwork can be boosted when using AT as a complement for those with reading and writing disabilities.

Assistive technology applications for students with reading difficulties: special education teachers’ experiences and perceptions

“…As such, the many opportunities to interact with texts, using TTS-or STT functions, were perceived to have the desired effect on the continuation of student development of for example syntactic knowledge and vocabulary access and growth. These findings translated to the results from the main study [1], which showed that the intervention students did not fall behind the controls on reading measures. However, although, even if these initial explorative results are promising, further studies are needed to determine if, and how AT can be used for the development of the skills needed for text comprehension and text production, as well as how to align assistive technology app usage into the general classroom teaching of written language skills.…”

“…In line with these recommendations, and from other guidelines and conclusions of AT-usage [1,16,28], the present study explored how the students who participated in the AT-intervention were perceived to be affected, in terms of to what extent the technology enabled the user to assimilate and to communicate text using TTS and STT-functions. The study also explored how AT were perceived to impact motivation and independence for textbased learning and schoolwork in general.…”

“…Results from the previous control study [1] showed that the intervention students (whose level of reading difficulties were severe, see the method section for further details) had about equal gains in all of the measurements of reading up to a year after the intervention, compared to control students who continued with traditional special education remedies and other support (i.e., treatment as usual). It seems from this study that AT, which included a systematic six-week intervention of text interaction exercises with apps, over other special education remedies and support, did not affect the students reading development negatively.…”

“…Furthermore, this study was not designed for estimating a statistical difference between groups, but to describe the extent teachers perceived how AT functioned for the students in each group. Thus, as in the RCTstudy [1] the older age groups were analysed as combined, which also was motivated by the resemblance in the organization of everyday education. The purpose of using quantitative survey measures was to explore the perceived usability of apps from a large sample of special education teachers.…”

“…This study is one part of a larger Swedish project investigating the impact of assistive reading and writing apps (primarily with text-to-speech, TTS, and speech-to-text, STT functions) for students with reading difficulties in Grade 4, Grade 8 and in high school [1]. In this part of the project, we explored special education teachers' perceptions whether these technological functions are sufficiently beneficial to be used as assistive technology (AT), in order to bypass typical decoding and writing problems associated with reading difficulties.…”