Multimedia Facilitation of Communication
Skills In Children With Various Handicaps.
Mikael Heimann and Tomas Tjus
International collaborator: Keith E Nelson, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Recently,
Heimann et al. (1993; in
press) observed promising
results on the
language of children with autism after a relatively short
intervention based
on the integrated effects of a motivating multimedia environment
and
teacher-child interactions. One of the goals were to allow the child
to
construct sentences freely and to give fast one-to-one
feedback through
many channels (sound/graphics/video). This gives the
handicapped child a
unique possibility to experiment with language in a fun and
fantasy-like
way, and at the same time develop both verbal and social
interactions with
the teacher, a possibility not commonly provided for in educational
programs for children with autism. Thus, the limitations in language
use
that is often imposed in traditional settings might make educators
and
parents miss the possible positive impact that fun and challenging
fanciful
sentences might have on the language development of children
with
autism (and probably also children with other handicaps),
especially if the
language is constructed by the child and not by anyone else!
Our overall goals have been to develop and evaluate the impact of
interactive multimedia procedures for facilitating the acquisition of
reading,
writing, and overall communication skills in children with
significant
delays in communicative development. These multimedia
procedures
have been adapted to the specific needs of four distinct
handicapped groups:
Hearing impaired children, multiply handicapped children, children
with
reading difficulties (dyslexia/suspected dyslexia/DAMP) and
children with
autism. The procedures implemented capitalizes on the effect of
programs
that allows a child to construct various sentences in text on the
computer
(e.g.: "The girl eats the apple"; "The panda puts the hat on the
gorilla's
table") and receive feedback in the form of spoken language,
graphic
animations or short video clips. Both the sentences and the
animations are
then used as input for the an expanding verbal and social
interaction
between the child and the teacher.
Initial theoretical base
There are strong and encouraging clues in prior publications that
many
children with autism (Heimann et al., 1991), mental retardation
(Nelson,
1988, 1989; Romski & Sevcik, 1989), multiple handicaps (Nelson,
Prinz,
Prinz & Dalke, 1991), and deafness (Martin, 1991; Nelson, Loncke &
Camarata, 1993) are very responsive to multimedia communicative
learning opportunities. It has also been demonstrated that well
planned
interventions might increase observed conversations between
teacher and
student although the effect on peer interactions or on
conversations within
a home-setting has been less well studied. Thus, there is a need to
expand
our studies on the effect of multimedia facilitation of language to
include
both peers and home observations (see also Rice, 1988).
At the motivational level, we assumed from the outset that
the child's
initiation and control of exploratory multimedia sequences would
promote
high motivation for learning new language structures and also
for an
increase in verbal interaction with the teacher. At the
communicative and
cognitive level, advances in text skills were assumed to depend
upon
efficient comparisons between challenging text and supporting
already-
established representations for voice or sign and for nonlinguistic
events.
In short, children needed to use only a limited processing
"space" to
compare new text to already-known representations of graphic
events and of
voice or sign. From a particular theoretical point of view, that of
the Rare
Event Learning Mechanism (RELM; Heimann, 1992; Nelson, 1991;
Nelson et
al., 1989) , such inter-modal comparisons were expected to
contribute rapidly
to learning if multiple processing facilitators were built into the
multimedia
interactions. Finally, the "side conversation" between teacher
and child
after the child's triggering of a text + graphics + spoken
language sequence
was designed to facilitate the child's progress toward higher levels
of
structure in their first language. These side conversations build in
recasts--
replies by the teacher that maintain the child's central meaning
but recast or
re-display that meaning in a new syntactic "package."
Previous and ongoing projects
In a recent quasi-experimental field study (Heimann et al.,
1993a,b, in press)
we investigated the effects of a planned intervention using a
computer-aided-
instruction (CAI) that included a highly motivating and interactive
multimedia environment when teaching children with autism or
mixed
handicaps (e.g.: cerebral palsy and/or mental retardation) reading ,
writing,
and communication skills. It was found that both groups of
handicapped
children increased their reading skills during the intervention
period, and
that this effect seemed to be specific to the intervention. A positive
effect on
the children's phonological development were also observed as
well as on
the social and verbal interaction between teacher and student.
The children
with autism in particular talked and discussed more with the
teacher as an
effect of the intervention, and they were also more prone to
express positive
feelings at the end of the intervention period than early on.
A new and even more flexible program, DELTAMessages is
the heart of our
second study which is still ongoing. Depending on the needs of the
individual learner, particular combinations of presentation modes
might be
chosen so that each child finds it easy to process their best modes
(e.g.
graphics, speech). In cognitive processing terms, combinations of
presentation modes are chosen so that each child finds it easy to
process
their best modes and use these modes to learn new levels of
communication. In addition, the teacher provides rich
conversational
models which helps to motivate the child's learning from the
multimedia
material.
As in our previous project that serves as a springboard, our new
and more
ambitious project collects data on the progress made by the
children in
several ways (during baseline, at start, during the intervention, at
the end,
and at a follow-up). The project also gives special emphasis to the
social
interactions that the teacher establishes with the child during
instruction.
The goals of instruction are to improve overall communication skills
and
motivation, not just to learn specific material embedded in the
software
presentations. Therefore, we train the teachers to use conversation
strategies and timing of social interaction in ways that both
challenge the
child toward learning more sophisticated speech or sign
communication
and that also support the child in enjoying and understanding the
sentences
and graphics presented through the computer software. Thus, we
also expect
this program to enhance social interactions between peers, and
hopefully
also between parents and their child in a home setting. Some
preliminary
support for our expectations can be found in a preliminary analysis
of the
data from the first twenty-three children that have completed their
training
(eleven children with autism, six with dyslexia, four with hearing
impairments, and two with cerebral pares; Heimann et al., 1994): A
significant increase in reading as compared with baseline.
Contact persons:
Mikael
Heimann
and Tomas Tjus
The DELTAMessages project: