What is Mastery of Assistive Technology and How Do We Measure It?
Hi everyone my name is Catherine Merritt. I am a speech pathologist and research instructor with SWAAAC. I'm super excited that you all are here for our September webinar. Just a quick note beforehand we will in a couple slides in have a quick Zoom poll just to gather some data around the learning objective so be on the lookout for that but otherwise I will go ahead and introduce our speaker today Dr. Ben Satterfield. Thank you Catherine. Good afternoon everybody I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today. We're going to be talking about Mastery of assistive technology and how we might go about measuring that. I have one of my research team with me today Karen Milchus and I'd like to
give her a chance to just introduce herself as we get kicked off here. Hi my name is Karen Milchus I'm a research engineer at CIDI the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation. I work primarily in the area of workplace accommodations and I will be kind of checking the chat and you know fielding some questions and to sort of taking notes today so thank you Ben for letting me join you. We also have a number of other people on our research team I'll just let you know that we're not alone we've gathered a rich array of talented people who work in various offices and aspects colleges within the Institute as we call it Georgia Tech. Bruce Walker is from the School of Psychology and this college of interactive Computing we also have Liz DiStefano who's the director of the center for education integrating science math and Computing or seismic for short. Salima Leforce is with Advanced the Center for Advanced Communication Policy and Patricia Griffith and Matthew Blake work with us at CIDI the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation and Patricia is our statistician and Matthew is our lead I.T person these people have made a
made a great contribution to what the work that we've done I just want to recognize their contributions. So let's go ahead and talk about the learning objectives today. I know you're going to be doing a poll here in a minute where you're going to sort of do a pre-test on what you know already so let's just talk a little bit about what we hope to accomplish today. The first thing is that we'll want to tell you a little bit about how we came up with the ideas that we've come up with and with this tool that we use to assess where someone is in their journey toward Mastery of assistive technology and we did that through a process known as the Delphi research method. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and I think it would be a a good objective to have as you being able to understand or remember one of the unique elements of that research method because it's pretty unique. Secondly we'd like you to do some thinking with us about what it is that becoming a power user or a an expert in assistive technology mastering the assistive technology what is what are some indicators of that and maybe what might be some predictors. So you could see that that's coming or that's the person's on the right trajectory to accomplish it and then lastly I'd like to ask you to join us in taking this tool and using it take it out for a spin test drive if you will and do a little evaluation on yourself. And so what I'd
like you to think about now is what what's a tool that you use some assistive technology tool that you're familiar with maybe use one that you feel like you're particularly good at using so maybe you've mastered it so assess your level of Mastery just off the top of your head at one through four point scale where one is a novice and four would be a power user of that assistive technology and then later we'll give you a chance to see how you score on the tool that we've created and then you can give us some feedback on it okay. So just to give you a little bit of background Karen and I work at the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation or CIDI which is one of several research centers that are part of the College of design at Georgia Tech. We're kind of unique because we do both research and service provision in the same house and there's not a there's not a lot of that that happens at Georgia Tech you're one or the other so we're kind of unique we're the result of a merger of two agencies or two research centers in the college. One was AMAC the Accessible Materials Access Center and CATEA or the Center for AT and Environmental Access and they've merged back in 2019 and have been a unit a self-contained unit on campus ever since. CIDI has kind of become a leader in pushing for advocating for accessibility locally in Georgia and around the campus accessibility for people with disabilities but to make sure that everybody has access to not just physical spaces but also to information and that includes web accessibility and educational materials and the like. So we do a lot of consulting with agencies on accessibility
we do provide Braille Services captioning and described audio we provide a lot of e-text and also we have a certified assistive technology team that can work directly with individuals who need assistance and can provide training. So we serve virtually all of the schools in the University system in the state of Georgia and then we have some other schools around the country that we also support or provide services for and one of the things that CIDE does and this will factor into what we're going to say in a minute we provide alternative or I should say accessible educational materials to students who are going to college in Georgia. if you have a disability and you you need to have your textbook in an alternative format or a braille or you need captioning services while you're taking a class listening to a lecture we're the guys who step up to provide that. So we've also provided a library of software so that if a student comes to Georgia College and they need accessible materials they also can get the software for a period of time to one semester at a time to allow them to make take advantage of the materials that they get in accessible format.
So that's CIDI that's where we come from and the organization tools for life is part of that organization. part of my work has has been four tools for life as well as CIDI is celebrating its 30th year as Georgia's assistive technology program tools for life serves all ages and all disabilities throughout the state all Georgians and our mission is to just reduce the barriers and expand access to assistive technology that can help individuals live learn work and play as independently as they can in their community of choice. so we've also had one other feature the what's called the National Pass it On Center which is a national technical assistance center for the 56 different Tech Act agencies around the country and throughout the U.S territories to help develop safe and effective realization processes to support AT reuse. so we're not just about new and what we are about new and exciting things about assistive technology but we're also in the business of helping take slightly used and refurbished assistive technology and make it available where people need to get access to that. so anyway that's kind of where we're coming from.
I think you are probably aware of the fact that we have a a growing research base about assistive technology and its Effectiveness or the outcomes of assistive technology going back to the 80s and the 1990s these studies weren't shall we say Ironclad they stood to be done with more robust research methodology but they all tend to point in the direction of positive impacts from the use of assistive technology in education particularly in K-12 and the one study that really stands out that is kind of robust is the national longitudinal study this was done between 2000 and 2010 so it was covered several years over 300,000 students took part in the study and what we found was pretty amazing when it comes to using assistive technology. For instance 99.8 percent of the students who receive assistive technology while they were in high school graduated and among those who didn't receive any at just under 80 percent graduated. The study also found that about 81 percent of the students who received assistive technology went on to some kind of a post-secondary institution whether it was a tech school or Community College or a four-year Institution but only about 40 percent of the people who didn't use assistive technology in school went on to do that and then to go further to look at the the employment situation about 80 percent of the students who received assistive technology had a paying job after high school but only about 51 of the ones who didn't had a paying job. That was pretty stunning information and so it's it's encouraged I think and added weight to the research that has been going forward but it also encourages us knowing that when kids are exposed to and have a chance to develop a mastery of assistive technology we should be looking for graduation rates to rise post-secondary participation to increase better workplace outcomes and also some of the other research also points to Independent living outcomes being better in terms of kids being able to live on their own and be successful. Okay so knowing this we at the CIDI back in the days when it was called AMEC we were serving students college students throughout the state of Georgia as they would come through their universities they would come to to AMAC which was the what we call CIDI then to receive the support they needed. They would get their accessible materials from us they could download software and use it and we also had a customer support Center that would work pretty much around the clock. I mean if kids needed help in the evenings we were there and we were trying
to assist them in using the tools and downloading their textbooks that were in a special format but what this the support team started to find was that there were some students that were just really hard to help that we we reached out to them we provided training just like we did the ones who were successful but for some reason it just didn't stick you know so we started trying to figure out what it was that was going on and how we could be more effective because these students were you know not not doing very well in their in their studies and what we decided to do was to look at the difference between their preparation you know how prepared they were coming out of high school to use the technology that we were providing. That seemed to be one possibility so we did a little study. We've called it the AMAC study. We looked at several hundred students we focused on kids with learning disabilities ADHD some kids on the high end of the autism spectrum but kids with what we call High incidence disabilities and we looked at their high school we asked them to tell us some things about their experiences in high school and tried to map out whether or not they felt like they had mastered their technology when they were in high school and if they did we looked at them in one category and if they didn't we looked at the students who didn't in a different category so then we asked them some more questions about what happened when they got to college and we took grade point average the difference between grade point average in high school and then in college as an indicator as to whether they were more successful in college or less so or you know in terms of projecting the the success rate that they had in school so we mapped grade point average from high school to college and we looked at whether they identified themselves as being a somebody who was familiar with assistive technology coming out of high school and what we found shouldn't surprise us it really maps nicely over what we were experiencing in our customer service center is that kids who master their technology when they're in high school have a better chance of being successful in college. It doesn't cover everything I mean you still got to apply yourself but clearly there was a there was a difference between those students who knew how to use their technology and their performance in the first year of school and the students who didn't really have a good handle on it in their performance. Okay I think I've linked or put it in here the the how to get that particular study if you want to read it it's available through the assistive technology outcomes and benefits journal and that is an open Journal so you don't have to pay anything if you want to download it online ATOB is the acronym for it okay.
so we had this study it you know when we looked at it we said "Wow this this is pretty impressive information." It goes along with all that we've been seeing the evidence and that sort of thing but there were a lot of questions that were left unanswered and we wanted to sort of take a look at what it is what's really going on here so we talked we thought about what what Mastery is you know becoming an effective user of something and what does Mastery look like as it applies to assistive technology and can we measure it is it something we can track now we know some things. We know what assistive technology is that's defined for us by federal law and just so we're all on the same page assistive technology is anything any piece of equipment whether it's purchase off the shelf or it's made as a one-off to be customized for an individual the anything that's going to improve the functional capabilities of an individual including aspects like learning, work, home living and their ability to navigate the community and so that embraces high-tech, low-tech, mid-tech and will you have to plug it in or it takes batteries or whether it's just a laminated piece of paper with some really important stuff on it you know it's the technology is defined this way and and we're for the purposes of this study we're not shrinking or limiting the definition so as we talk about this keep an open mind in terms of what kinds of technology this might apply to. Okay now we took a look at several models to try to figure out some sort of a hypothetical starting point and we looked at several that you might be familiar with. Patricia Dowden has a Continuum of communication Independence that has to do with AAC users that talks about different stages that AAC users go through and how they become effective users. Gerald Craddock back in 2006 had us a study
that he published talking about the Continuum in education going from a novice to a power user and then in the more General category of Technology use Dreyfus at Dreyfus have done several studies and there's a rich literature going back to the 1980s talking about a four or five stage model of how one Masters mental activities so we use those as sort of models to help shape what we were going to postulate as the the pattern that this followed. What we came up with was a four stage progression that we sort of anticipate or what from our experience we thought users of assistive technology go through to be moving from a novice user to the power user through a couple of different stages and we called them the second stage was context dependent because you're becoming more familiar with the technology but you're using it in specific situations and perhaps with specific individuals helping you but then you become a transitional user in the third stage where you're becoming more independent but you still haven't got it all figured out you're still trying to make your way with the technology and then ultimately you become a power user so we pull together a team of researchers to to work on this. We've got a grant from Georgia Tech to study this and what we wanted to do was to develop a conceptual framework around which or through which we might think about Mastery of assistive technology and we wanted to see if we could develop a tool some way to measure it some way to plot progress or see where you are at any particular moment and maybe get some ideas about how that what the next step might be that sort of thing okay so that was our our starting point.
The methodology we chose to use was what's known as the Delphi method. I don't know if you know very much about this but this is really kind of neat. Back in the 1960s when the world was still very much a cold war mentality and nuclear shall we say the threat of nuclear war was kind of real you know it was it was something that people were seriously thinking about and it was a political reality in the in the inner International political Arena the Rand corporation called on some scientists to try to give them some idea about what would be the likely outcomes of a nuclear war and how would we best plan to recover from it. In that eventuality kind of a bright cheerful concept so investigate but the idea was they used they developed this methodology in the process because one of the things they wanted to do is they had a number of different experts they wanted to hear from and they wanted them to be able to speak their mind and they wanted to try to clarify what each one of them had to say but they realized some of these guys have got some other well they're scientists and so many of them have very determined notions about what the the realities of the world and they were afraid that it would all just get into a you know maybe throwing spitballs at each other by the time if they try to get them all in the room at the same time so what they did was they separated them and allowed them to give input but they did it anonymously and so they tapped the expertise of all these different scientists collected the information and then repackaged it and it sent it back sent it back out in a series of iterative steps to let the scientists say oh okay that's what the the group seems to think, I agree with this point, I disagree with this point. So they could make their observations in
detail and then in the next round they would be collected again and shared with each of the scientists and then they could comment again and the goal was as time went on in a series of these iterative steps then the groups would come together and there would be sort of a consensus about the various issues that were involved in that research. So we use that same technique. We felt like that was an important way to really hear from people who had important things to say and if we were going to get a panel of experts that needed to include some people with disabilities who had become or we felt like they had become power users so we needed to hear from them we needed to know what they thought we also reached out to a number of people who had helped people become power users you know through their work as providers of technology. So we went for four rounds usually this Delphi method lasts three or four rounds we went the full four rounds and the each round is going to begin with some opportunity to react to information or to create information and then the subsequent rounds would react to the those reactions that had been collected from the previous round. Does that make sense? So we're putting information or collecting information from the group synthesizing it and putting it back out for their reaction. Okay
I don't know if there are any questions about that but I'd be happy to answer them before we go on. Okay and we can always drop back and talk about this some more as we go on but our panel had 12 members to it and we're just really really we're excited about the the nature of this team because we had a number of different disabilities represented we also had different affiliations so we had two folks with vision impairments, two with learning disabilities, two with motoric impairments, one with a hearing impairment, one of the communication disorder, an AAC user, but we also had seven who were associated with academic institutions and eight were practitioners in their own right. As you can imagine some of these people were in more than one category but was a real rich diversity and breadth of experience. They had done a lot of stuff for themselves in terms of arriving at Mastery and had done a lot to help others achieve Mastery so this was we just felt like this was a real good group and the insights they gave us definitely met and exceeded our expectations. Okay so in round one we use the first steps to get them to brainstorm about what came to their minds what did they think of when they heard the term or they saw the term a power user of assistive technology so you know we're we're asking this question seeking a framework for thinking about the characteristics that comprise Mastery and we thought okay well let's start by looking at what the power user the person who achieves Mastery.
What are the characteristics that they or what what are the the features the the factors the the predictors if you will? What is it that that if you see this in an individual who is learning assistive technology this is a good indicator that they're going to wind up becoming a power user or maybe they've arrived so then what are the indicators of having arrived? So I kind of want to invite you to join us today in kind of revisiting that process and kind of looking at what it what it takes to become or what you think of when you here's a term or you see these words a power user of assistive technology. So what I'd like you to do for just a minute here and you can write this on a piece of paper and then pick one or two and put them in the chat or you can just put them in the chat if you want to but I'd like you to stop and take a minute and think about what it means to be a power user of assistive technology and just fire away we want to hear what you think. You all have some great ideas, keep them coming, this is good. Okay that's outstanding. Feel free to keep adding to the list. I just want to mention a couple, just
kind of bring them up here just to so that we can kind of get them out in front of us. The ability to teach others how to use their technology, being an independent user, operational proficiency, independent, spontaneous, effective and efficient, using it quickly and easily, somebody who uses AT consistently and effectively in various contexts throughout their environment, can troubleshoot, intrinsically motivated, competency, can use it over a variety of subjects, can teach themselves to locate unfamiliar components in the device, so Advanced knowledge and technique of how AT works. Independent use in novel situations, troubleshooting, use it for things that they identify as important to them the user, yeah and in ways that work for them, self-edit, the ability to adjust the technology for their uses, their purposes, independent using in various settings, can use it fluency. Sort of an automaticity type of thing perhaps. Okay these are excellent ideas. I appreciate your taking the time with us to kind of think this through because I think it'll make a lot of sense as we look at what's what happened. As we got this feedback from our panel the panel gave us a lot of information I mean these people really had thought it through and they spent a lot of time giving us feedback and we had I don't know hundreds of characteristics now.
Many of them were very similar and they didn't just give us one word or two word phrases they were they were long descriptions so we tried to package that and what we came up with was the sort of what we call our superset of characteristics that summarize in about 30 characteristics. The thinking of our panel on what a power user what the indicators were or what the profile of someone who was a power user would be and here's what they came up with. And I'll just run through it so we can get it out in front of us. Access to support, problem solving, access to training, flexibility, Independence, seeing some familiar ideas here, Ingenuity. creativity, technical knowledge, knowledge of AT options and solutions, the ability to troubleshoot, usage curiosity, technical skills, motivation, self-awareness, diligence, opportunities to use the AT, self-advocacy, technical experience, proactivity, connection to the AT Community, patience, time to learn and to experiment and to learn adaptability, access to AT, experience with AT, persistence, practice, connection to other AT developers, and money and resources. So that's the the superset that
our of characteristics that our panel came up with. Let me throw it open and if you want to unmute your mic and make a comment here. What do you think about this? You're welcome to enter in the chat as well but give us your feedback. What do you think about this list? Is it similar to what you were thinking? There's some items here that surprise you or what's your thought? Can we say that at least some of the ideas that you all came up with appear on this on this list? Are there any ones that appear on this list that surprise you? The reference to networking is interesting. Anyone have any plots they want to share? Okay again we can curious about the money and resources yeah that was an interesting point.
Okay well we can come back to this if there are some things that pop out at us in our next two rounds what we did was take these characteristics in our superset and we put them back out to the panel and we asked them to talk about them what what did they think about them prioritizing for us you know which ones are the most important are there some that are just not that important or some need to be combined or did some need to be expanded on so the group gave us comments gave us some ideas about prioritization and we were asking them in particular to look at each of those characteristics and tell us which were the most important as indicators of someone having become a power user and they did a likert scale one to five one being not that important five being very important and then which were the most likely predictors so if you're working with someone and you're trying to help them learn how to use their assistive technology what are some what are some things to look for predictors that indicate that the person would eventually become a power user and again they rated those on a scale of one to five five being essential one being not very important okay. And we went through a couple of rounds until there was an emerging consensus around a set of about 12 to 15 factors and here here they are in terms of predictors uh and the rank order was opportunity to use AT is number one, knowledge of AT options was number two, problem solving number three, four was able to troubleshoot, five was motivation, six was persistence, seven was adaptability, eight was self-advocacy, nine was time to experience and learn, 10 was access to AT, 11 was flexibility in there went through a little bit of a morphing of the definition there in terms of flexibility related to high tolerance for error, and then 12 was technical knowledge. So those were the 12 items that the panel felt were predictors of somebody eventually becoming an assistive a master of assistive technology the indicators of someone having arrived were these. Top one was problem solving, second was adaptability, third was knowledge of AT options, fourth was access to AT, fifth was ability to troubleshoot, sixth opportunity to use AT, seven was Independence, eight motivation, nine flexibility in terms of high tolerance for error, 10 technical knowledge, 11 improved effective use, 12 self-advocacy, 13 time to experience and learn, and 14 desire to be independent.
So based on what you just thought through and your list that you all came up with, what are your reactions to this this list, the predictors and the indicators? Any surprises here on the the prioritization? Do you see any patterns? We have a rather quiet group Ben. That's okay, it's been a long day I'm sure for all of us. So anyway this gives you an idea about we've got the the mean rankings there that show you the level of consensus so everyone thought that the these items were pretty highly ranked pretty significant relative to or the order of importance. Okay got a few thoughts here. Knowledge to AT and time to use AT, problem solving and troubleshooting seem to be at the top of both yeah. And there is clearly a sense of intrinsic motivation to some of this yeah. Finding it a little strange that access and opportunities are indicators okay.
I suppose someone having a lot of access might suggest that they have a better chance of mastering it than someone who didn't get access very often or opportunity to use the AT very often we all are familiar with the AAC device that's comes to school with the kid and then goes on the Shelf until they get ready to get on the bus and go home but what comes out when the speech pathologist shows up and is is helping to to work with the student for 20 minutes twice a week but then it's not you know in use all the time. Oh I see what you're saying that's a predictor right okay all right I find self-advocate advocacy interesting as this can be shot down so quickly by society that wants people to be verbal yeah. That's a good point. Okay any other thoughts? A lot of indicators share a common theme.
So what we found in this set of indicators and predictors was that they kind of clustered together around four we're calling them constructs specific categories of approach to Mastery of assistive technology and those four are experienced with AT proficiency with AT knowledge of AT and a personal identification with AT so in general the experience with AT is to construct that it talks about having had time to experiment with their assistive technology and learn how to use their tool it's going to necessarily necessitate sufficient access to their AT an opportunity to use it so that Mastery would develop it involves a series of positive experiences so that you're motivated to continue using it and reinforce the learning and the growth as they experience their device or their their software or whatever the tool is and it's further evidenced by improved Effectiveness and their ability to use it with greater Independence as time goes on the proficiency is the construct that we use to describe effective use of the assistive technology the growth The Experience aptitude with AT the individual begins to apply it to more and more scenarios engages more fully in the features that come in their AT but the troubleshooting is part of this this is knowing your device when it's not working as expected what to do but then there's also problem solving which is identifying the barriers to using your ID your AT in the environment and how to work with it to resolve problems in the environment work with your AT and then there's the development of technical skills that come along with application of the AT in different situations in terms of knowledge of assistive technology this is involving technical knowledge that develops an awareness of what's going on in in your system of willingness to explore and to investigate things an ability to expand their knowledge about their AT and to do so more independently as time goes on the ability to make informed in Choice informed choices about AT which tool which feature to use in for which task and the functional knowledge about assistive technology which just comes gets developed as they use it more and more and then with the interesting one for us was the this list of characteristics that sort of come under personal identification with their assistive technology it's almost like in order for you to really Master it somebody mentioned something that had to do with automatic effortless natural use of it it's almost got to become an extension of Who You Are or your ability to call on it and use it in situations needs to become shaped and and developed by characteristics like adaptability and persistence flexibility especially tolerance for error Power users are motivated you know they demonstrate a desire to be independent their AT is part of that Independence it's a tool to express it for some of them they have developed the capacity to advocate for their needs they understand why it's important and when it's important as they come to Mastery and so they're more likely to be able to speak up and say this is why I need this and being proactive with a team they're participants in their care personal care and their life decisions and assistive technology becomes a part of that process so there's a nurturing of some soft skills that develop particularly with regard to AT use and this list kind of covers that so we sort of use that as a framework to develop in round four these factors into a format into an evaluation tool so we use a matrix format that was populated with sort of a rubric style set of definitions or descriptions of progress from novice all the way to power user and this that describes sort of the stages that one might go through in their Journey from novice to power user so we set up set it up sort of like a score sheet so that you take the these 22 different characteristics and say all right for myself or for another person if I'm evaluating them where do they stand in these four stages where do I think they stand right now between novice and power user and so the panel was asked to take the test evaluate themselves and then maybe go out and evaluate one or two other persons and give us some feedback and so that we collected the critique that they gave us and the feedback that information and ideas that they gave us and we built them into this tool so here's the tool it's called the Continuum of AT Mastery or the CATM. I'd like to invite you to take it out for a test drive and see what you think so in a minute I'm going to give you the link so you can go out and do that and then come back when you're finished but I'd like you to think about some assistive technology tool or device or something that you're that you've used that you feel comfortable with or maybe it's a new one and you're not all that easy of feeling the comfortable with but that's okay just pick one and then use it to complete the score sheet when you're through think about the results and there's a place at the bottom for you to give us some feedback about whether you think the result is accurate in terms of its assessment of where you stand with that tool and then there might be some things You observe about the query the questions are asked or the you know the the ease with which you took take this test this assessment and that we'd love to hear from you as you finish up so let me share with you here's the link it's https colon forward slash forward slash at Dash mastery Dot c-i-d-i dot g-a-t-e-c-h dot EDU so once you get to that website. Yes let's do that. Karen is that something you can put in the chat? I am working on it. Thank you ma'am. So once you get there you'll see a login screen that looks kind of like the one that's on the slide now. What you'll do is you'll click on please register here and
then you'll create a new user registration you'll create a username and a password and confirm it. And then once you've done that you click register and you'll be all set up in the system so then you want to log in using that new username and password and click on add a survey and do a self-evaluation and answer the questions see what you think and let you go after it if you have any questions as you attempt it don't hesitate to unmute or put a message in this in the chat and we can help you out if you have any problems. Okay so I'm doing an evaluation of myself or another in this case we'll do a self-evaluation and we'll begin the survey so there's a date and then the survey participants. For some reason I am not no the survey participant is myself that's right I'm doing a self-evaluation. So
what's the assistive technology am I using? I'll use read and write for my example. And the context or the what it's being used for I'll be reading in the classroom it's helpful to establish this because particularly when you're going to use it across multiple evaluators you need to sort of identify what what it is we're doing to to do a effective evaluation so here's the first set experience with AT. We've got access to AT, opportunity to use AT, positive experience with AT, and time to experiment and learn and the choices for novice are limited for context dependent occasional transitional user would be more frequent and a power user would be always and we have a little bit of a description so when we're talking about access to AT, we're talking about usage training support for AT that is appropriate for the individual so I might say I get that frequently opportunities to use it are frequent positive experience and occasionally successful with it a time to use it and I don't have much time to use it but it's it's out there for me I just don't get to use it very much okay so the next set has to do with proficiency with 18. and so we're talking about effective use troubleshooting
technical skills and problem solving and so again the descriptors are to the right so effective use is the use of AT to participate and do things that the user wants to do well yeah that's that's when I use it that's what I use it for troubleshooting not that good with troubleshooting this software when it when I have problems with it my technical skills I occasionally demonstrate that I I can make it do what I want problem solving in the environment I'll say occasional. Okay in the next section knowledge of AT we're talking about functional AT knowledge technical AT knowledge knowledge of options it's the ability to expand your knowledge of AT and making informed choices and again the descriptors are next to them so functional 18 knowledge is the individual becomes familiar with personality customized approach to using features personalizing strategies for use so I'm doing that some technical knowledge I have some knowledge about options I know more about the options that I know about actually using them expanding my knowledge I think I can do that but I'm I could stand to do it better and in making informed choices well I'd like to think I do that a lot but maybe not so I'll click some okay and then the last category is the personal connection with A2 so this is self-advocacy adaptability flexibility persistence Independence motivation and proactivity and then what we're seeing here is a description of each one so my ability to talk about my needs yeah I can do that my adaptability I can do that but I'm not I'm not I'm stubborn sometimes my flexibility my ability to deal to tolerate error I wish I could do better with that my persistence I'm pretty persistent so give me that I'm independent something I really want to do do it by myself so I'm motivated proactivity that may be a weakness for me I'm going to say so okay so I filled out all of the radio buttons for each of these and I'm ready to submit so I'm going to click on the submit button and what I get is the survey has been saved but I now I get a little score sheet and it gives me some information about the nature of the assessment here's the scoring for each of the four segments and then a total score my average on a five point scale is 2.5 and then I get a little bit of a bar graph to see sort of graphically where I am so I'm kind of a tradition a transitional user but I can go back to that to the results and I can see where I need to go next in terms of what my score was in each one of those. Okay and then if you get a chance to complete this we also have at the bottom of the score sheet a chance to give us some feedback on whether the instructions were clear whether you feel like this was an accurate assessment please note any omissions or aspects that were confusing and how do you think a tool like this might be used and when you're finished you can hit click the submit button and it'll be part of our you know you can have input into our process as well any questions or thoughts about that. Have any of you had a chance to complete it on your own? And more importantly did you see your own responses or did you see the responses of someone else who is filling it under the same name? I'm not sure if anything was getting overwritten there. Well that's what I was wondering is what you found when you went out there well we'll get that fixed probably within the next 24 hours. I tested it just before we came on and
I didn't find any problems so I'm not really sure what what came of that. Okay let me know is there anything else anybody wants to see or to illustrate from this score sheet I'm going to stop sharing and go back to the presentation if I could. Well it looks as if a few people have had some success with that, great. So you had one question maybe add myself as a survey participant and add the person that could be it might have to do with how how you were registering as a user at the beginning. So this is a kind of a bird's eye view of what that form looks like so once it's completed you'll get a sheet that you could print it out as a PDF or you could leverage it as saved online.
Okay we're going to need to wrap things up here but if you get a chance it would be great if you could fill out those feedback questions and give us some ideas about what you thought because that's basically the rest of our presentation was to try to encourage you to give us some feedback and tell us what you think. So I want to thank you for wading through this with us and taking part in the the thought process of developing the idea of what Mastery of assistive technology is welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation in the future so please feel free to reach out to us and what I'm going to do is jump to the end and put our contact information up. So if you want to reach out and continue the conversation please feel free to do so thanks everybody.
Thank you so much Dr. Satterfield and thank you to all of you our participants. Dr. Satterfield we really appreciate you for sharing your time and expertise on this really important topic today. I see many comments in the chat about just how interesting and helpful this is so we really appreciate it and Dr. Satterfield did graciously allow us to record this
presentation today so we will post this recording on our SWAAAC YouTube channel and I will send the link to all of our registered participants as soon as it's ready. It'll either be from Brenda or I and also everyone please expect a post-training survey in your email in just a few minutes. This will only take three to five minutes to complete and your feedback is really important to us we do read every comment and your certificate of attendance will be sent once we receive that survey from you. Lastly you can find more
important information about future professional development opportunities including more of our monthly webinars at SWAAAC.org and we hope to see you all again soon. Thanks so much everyone. Bye everybody.
2022-09-30 20:22
