Assessing Student's Needs for Assistive Technology (ASNAT)

Chapter 5 – Assistive Technology for Reading, Studying, and Math
told the teacher that she was “saying it in her head” when she did this.) Finally, she made a noise to
“say” the word aloud. Later in the year when presented with a word, she was asked if she knew what the
word was or needed to sound it out.
Mary’s receptive vocabulary was good and she was able to comprehend most words once she was able
to sound them out. She demonstrated this by matching pictures to words and by pointing to the correct
word when given a definition or shown the meaning of the word. She was able to make her selection
from the array by pointing to one item with her finger. When pointing to printed words, the font needed
to be at least 30 point.
Mary’s reading recognition and reading comprehension were again assessed one year after the pretest
using the PIAT. She scored at the 1.5 grade equivalent in both areas. Because her pretest scores were
K.8 and K.0 respectively, she made seven months academic gain in reading recognition and one and a
half years academic gain in reading comprehension. That is very impressive when you think about the
fact that during the previous 11years of school, she had made only eight months gain in reading
recognition and no gain in reading comprehension.
Discussion
All three students in this study made significant gains. These data indicate that the combination of
internal speech, diagnostic distractor arrays, error analysis and assistive technology are an effective
approach for teaching reading to students with SSPI. One of the keys to using this technique effectively
is to attend carefully to the words and pictures used as distractors. They must be carefully selected to test
the student’s ability to discriminate between very similar letters, sounds, letter combinations, or
meanings. Highly dissimilar words or pictures would not be effective in assessing specific knowledge.
Assessing Students’ Needs for Assistive Technology (2004) 136