Robin Hurd

Defining our terms: Evidence-Based Practice

Changes in legislation in the United States have made a big difference in the way school staff are expected to serve special needs students. One of those big differences is that staff must be able to provide evidence to support their decisions about what and how they teach, what kind of assistive technology they provide, and even what kind of placement they recommend for students with special needs. Schools also need to be prepared to use evidence to show that students are indeed learning and achieving their goals.

As evidence-based practice becomes the standard expectation within education, it is important for parents as well as school staff to understand what evidence –based practice is, and what kinds of evidence should be considered when planning for our children’s education, and how to gather that evidence.

Too often, evidence-based practice seems like something for medical doctors and researchers, and is intimidating to people who aren’t trained in it—including, at times, school staff. By taking a look at how evidence-based practice can guide the way students are taught and improve the results of that teaching, we can take this concept from a theoretical one, to one that has everyday applications.

First, let’s look at the types of evidence that are available. We can group evidence into 3 categories: evidence on normal development of children, evidence on others who fit into our child’s disability grouping, and evidence specifically about our child.

Evidence on normal development of children includes much research that school staff are already familiar with. An example of this is Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, which we talked about in a Parent’s Corner article in March. Another familiar bit of research that fits into this category is Brown’s Stages of Language Development, which shows what words children learn through each phase of learning to talk. Both of these pieces of research are useful, even though our children have special needs, but they are not the only bits of research done on normally developing children that have application to children with special needs.

Evidence on others who fit into our child’s disability grouping would be research that involved children with identified disability labels that also apply to our children: language delays, children who use AAC, autism, apraxia, cerebral palsy, motor impairments, and so on. This type of research can help guide us to specific practices that have been already proven to produce results with students who have disabilities similar to our children and help us determine evidence based expectations of what our children can achieve.

The third type of research is data collected specifically about our child. This is information that shows us exactly how well the game plan is working for our child, and what works best. One way to collect this type of data is to use Language Activity Monitoring (LAM) to automatically record what your child says on the AAC system, how long it took to say each word, and how often your child is using pre-stored messages, making up his own sentences or using spelling and word prediction. For more information on LAM, see the December 2004 Parent’s Corner article. Other types of research specifically about your child can be about access methods. How fast can your child access the AAC stem? Where should the switch be placed and what type of switch gets the best results? Does your child’s accuracy improve with a keyguard? Larger buttons on the AAC system? How is your child’s vision? Hearing? If there a time of day when accuracy and speed are best? Worst? Too often, these questions are answered by our best guess, but for the best outcomes, these questions can and should be answered by information, not guesswork.

These three types of evidence can work together to help get the best results possible for children who use AAC. For example, using evidence on how children who are beginning to speak use words (Brown’s stages of Language Development), we can know what words a child who is beginning to learn to speak using AAC should have access to. Using information gained from other children with and without language delays, we can plan to teach these words in the way children learn best: within the context of meaningful activities, instead of rote memory and drill. By gathering evidence from the child we are working with, we can check for the most effective access method for the device. But most importantly, we can keep track of what type of words the child is saying with the AAC system and plan our teaching to target new words that children who are learning to talk would be learning next (based on evidence we looked at in the beginning.)

All three types of evidence work together to make sure that the child who uses AAC gets an AAC system—device plus the training to go with it— that is based on best practices in teaching and language development. The end result of evidence based practice, aside from simply meeting the requirements for it the schools are now facing, is that the student who uses AAC is now most likely to see the results we want: a child who is learning and developing language skills that will be useful all of her life.

As always, your comments and questions help keep this column interesting! E-mail me at parents@aacinsititute.org .