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The DT Trainer is becoming known as a valuable tool to especially help teach those individuals with autism and other learning disabilities. Below is a paper that covers the educational problem and effective teaching methods when performed by people and how these methods can also be performed by computers. Appropriately designed software can now be an important tool in the education of difficult to educate individuals. The paper gives the framework for how our software is designed and why it is effective. I hope that you find the paper informative. I want to thank Mary McDonald, Assoc. Exec Director Genesis/Eden II for her contributions.
Karl Smith
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Teaching Individuals with Severe Learning Deficiencies
Karl W. Smith,
Accelerations Educational Software Effective methods for teaching individuals with severe learning disabilities are being evolved by universities and centers of excellence and are today spreading through the educational system. Through extensive research, researchers and educators are developing effective methods to teach individuals with some of the most severe learning difficulties. Once teaching methods have been shown to be effective for learners with severe learning difficulties, these teaching methods can also be incorporated into teaching software. Severe learning deficiencies can be a combination of a poor ability to:
Depending on the degree of impairment with each characteristic and the learner's prior learning experiences, the learner may be cooperative, slightly uncooperative, to possibly even highly combative in a learning situation. An individual with severe learning deficiencies generally has difficulty learning and maintaining skills. Additionally, it is often a great challenge to motivate these learners. The less an individual is able to be successful in learning, the more he is focused on a limited set of abilities and interests, no matter how strange, and the greater his ability to tolerate sameness. The individual that has had mostly failure in his learning will usually have a mild to an extreme resistance to trying anything new. He tends to want to stay with what is familiar and be uninterested in, to extremely fearful of anything new. He tends to have repetitious behaviors and limited interests. The combination of non-compliant behavior toward learning and very poor learning skills generally makes an individual difficult to teach. In such cases, successful teaching of a skill includes the following:
The most successful teaching with an individual with severe learning deficiencies is a long term intensive micro-management of the learning process. The greater the degree of poor learning skills, lack of motivation, and lack of cooperation, the greater the degree that we must micro manage the learning process to be significantly successful. Also the greater degree of poor learning skills the more we have to explicitly teach him/her everything we need him/her to know. The individual can learn numerous skills and concepts in parallel, and we must know where s/he is on each item to appropriately move each skill along a learning path. We have to know the appropriate level and method of prompting, reinforcement, and instructional technique for each skill and concept we are teaching a learner. We must timely provide the support level and method for each task. Due to these extra teaching demands, it is difficult to significantly teach a very uncooperative learner in a group. The best outcome is with intensive instruction (often 1:1) that complies with behaviorally based teaching methods. Fortunately, computers are great way of recording and tracking large amounts of data and are capable of providing a wide variety of reinforces such as music, videos, visual effects, basic cause and effect, and even highly sophisticated games. Inexpensive computers and software could provide a portion of the educational needs of the student. Unfortunately, commercially available software has little accommodation for an individual with very poor learning skills or for an individual that lacks the ability to cooperate. Here are some of the problems:
Fortunately, software programs can be designed to accommodate the needs of individuals with severe learning deficiencies. A software package called the DT Trainer was designed to teach these individuals and handle the above problems. The DT Trainer:
The incorporation of the above features into the DT Trainer allows most individuals, even individuals with very poor learning skills, to become independent learners on the product. A key component is to get the learner to want to do a large amount of work for the length of time necessary. The DT Trainer provides the learner intensity and duration with the most powerful commercially available reinforcement system. The DT Trainer complies with the basic principles of behaviorally-based teaching methods, and by doing so it taps into what has been demonstrated as the most effective techniques with children with autism and other individuals with severe learning deficiencies. By offering the DT Trainer affordably, the product is a relatively inexpensive virtual teaching assistant in the classroom or home. For school use, the DT Trainer provides an extra "teacher" who always knows how to provide a prompt and reinforcer, and always collects data to document student progress. For home use, the DT Trainer provides a child with more productive learning time which frequently replaces less appropriate activities. Parents are frequently torn between keeping a child with special needs productively engaged or attending to other important tasks. The DT Trainer can give the parents time to attend to some of these tasks while keeping a child engaged learning important skills. Today, individuals with severe learning disabilities can benefit from the advances in teaching methods performed by human teachers and therapists, and also can benefit by software incorporating the same methods. Since most individuals do not receive the amount of human intervention needed, we need to look to technology to help deliver part of their education. As products like the DT Trainer become available for the range of issues that computers could teach, we will be able to help these individuals go further toward becoming productive members of society.
Karl Smith
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