Practical Ways for Teaching Nonverbal Learners--Come Join Us!

   You are invited to join the conversation between Peggy Ployhar and myself on October 1, 2019 at 8pm (Central Time Zone). We'll be talking about ways you can teach your nonverbal children and teenagers. This conversation is directed at families who homeschool but is relevant to nonverbal learners in the school system as well. Bring your questions about adapting instruction and evaluation and we'll give them our best go!

If you haven't yet seen the awesome website SPED Homeschool sponsoring this event, it's a MUST SEE for families living with special needs. While the target audience is homeschooling families, all families living with disability will find a wealth of information and support at this site. There are articles and videos galore from experts with a wealth of information and personal experience. Many of the topics address issues extending outside the school day, such as incorporating therapy into the day or making religious instruction accessible to kids with a variety of special needs. If you participate in Facebook, SPED Homeschool sponsors some groups that sound pretty fabulous. Take a few minutes to browse the site and you will be impressed.

See you on October 1st!
Rose-Marie

Two Choices Do NOT Equal a 50-50 Chance

“Whoa!” you say. “Everyone knows that you have a 50-50 chance with two choices.  What planet is this crazy lady from? ”

You are not alone in this thinking.  I hear over and over that we have to give MANY choices per question…and have gotten caught up thinking this way myself in the past. We think many choices will prove our kids aren’t simply guessing. When our kids deal with motor impairments, though, too many choices can be an access nightmare. What to do, what to do?

The fact is, with testing, selecting from two choices can give statistically irrefutable results showing mastery of information. Let’s look at how this can be…

First let’s look at what makes a 50-50 chance

We’ll start by backing up to a situation where two choices DO have a 50-50 chance of being correct. Take a coin and predict whether it will land with heads or tails up. Now toss it one time and let it land. At this moment, you DO have a 50-50 chance that it will show heads. Or tails. Agreed?

You could repeat this same random coin toss ten times and about five of those tosses would be heads.

Try it a hundred times and you should get about 50 tosses coming up tails.

Why is this so? Why do half the tosses give heads and half give tails?

Because the only factor at play is luck. All the other factors are equal for each side of the coin on every toss…the balance of the coin, the number of rotations in a flip, the speed of travel... These weigh equally on the outcome. They won’t change the probability of a guess based on luck.

If a student is genuinely guessing at answers, they are strictly shooting based on luck. You could expect about the same results as the coin toss. They would score about 50% correct on the answers of a true/false test, a sorts assessment with two columns, or another binary choice test.

When odds are no longer random

When all the factors to support student success are in place, luck doesn’t particularly influence the outcome. If the child knows the answer, has the appropriate access methods, and is caught on a day when health and sensory issues are met, then a correct answer likely has nothing to do with luck.

The factors at play—knowledge, access, and health issues—change the game completely. Testing is unrelated to the coin toss, even when there are only two possible responses.

When a child is able to score 5 correct responses on a 5-point true/false test, the statistical likelihood that this was achieved by pure guessing is about 3%.

But 3% still leaves a tiny possibility the child was guessing. Three chances in 100. How do we reduce that so we can know beyond a doubt that the child was demonstrating knowledge rather than luck?

It doesn’t take very many corrects to get pretty strong data

Five isn’t many questions for a test, but it IS a good number for a child whose ability to attend to a task is impaired by issues of access, attention, health, or sensory processing. If you can cycle through a longer test in short 5-question chunks, you can get some highly valid information in relatively short time.

5/5 correct can only be achieved by guessing 3% of the time, as we said earlier.

5/5 done twice (totaling 10/10) gives <.1% chance--less than 1 in 1000--of guessing as the means for achieving the score. That’s good enough for me (side note: this would not be adequate if we are talking about skills needed to fly a commercial airliner or perform neurosurgery, but for academic skills for most kids, it works).

5/5 done three times (or 15/15 total) only gives a .00003% chance of guessing…and that is statistically improbable. Most definitely.

The great news is that a child can still demonstrate high levels of understanding even if they can’t get a perfect score every time.

Let‘s say they can manage to get 4/5 correct on a group of True/False test questions. There is a 16% margin for guessing, which is too high to put our money on.

If they can get 4/5 again on a second try (a total of 8/10), the likelihood of arriving at this score by guessing drops to 4%. Still a little high.

The third time they score 4/5 (raising the total to 12/15), the probability of guessing drops to 1%. That is 1 in 100, so getting smaller!

The fourth time they manage 4/5 (or 16/20 now), the likelihood they are guessing drops to only .4%, or 4 in 1000. For basic academics, this satisfies my confidence they are exercising skill rather than luck.

Great news for our kids with motor impairments

This shows that kids with severe motor impairments who can only select between two responses really can demonstrate to us that their answers are intentional.

Obviously, having the motor control to indicate an answer from THREE choices is terrific for giving strong proof that your answers are not guesses. It lets you get to that point faster.

For example, in a 5-question quiz where each question has THREE responses, a perfect score of 5/5 only has a .004% chance of being achieved by guessing. Everyone can agree that this score is pretty unlikely to result from luck!

But when motor skills dictate that TWO choices are best, our kids can still demonstrate their proficiency without the fear of that guessing has influenced their scores. It just takes longer.

Also, it takes longer if they can’t achieve a perfect score every time. But it can be done. That, friends, takes a huge burden of pressure off both the student and his teacher!

A tool to simplify this statistical computation

Back in my college statistics class, we had to crunch the numbers to rule out the probability of guessing. On scratch paper. By hand. It was grueling!

Now, we have a fantastic FREE tool online that can do this for us. In  a split-second!

www.stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial.aspx

It’s so easy to use!

1.       On the first line, type in the "chance" of getting one problem correct, expressed as a decimal. In a 2-choice problem, the chance is .5. In a 3-choice problem, the chance is .33. For a problem with 4 choices, the chance is .25. Kids with motor issues should not be given more than 4 selections per question, so I won’t go farther.

2.       On the second line, tell how many questions on the test.

3.       On the third line, write how many corrects the student scored.

4.       The fourth line will tell you the probability that the student could have arrived at their score by guessing. The tinier the number, the less chance there is that the student guessed.

Hidden messages:  guessing and intentional misses

Scores that are not perfect (or close to perfect) hide important information for us to uncover.

Those that fall around the 50% chance of being achieved simply by luck were probably the result of guessing. So why is the student guessing? Do they not care? That’s OFTEN the case! Do they not understand? Very possible, but the fact that they haven’t established any kind of generalization, even an incorrect one, means they have not caught ANY of your instruction.

Scores that show a statistical probability that answers are actual errors (say, 0-1/10) rather than guessing are also strongly telling. When you type the figures into Stattrek.com, you will see that the likelihood of guessing only errors is a slim as guessing only corrects. There is a message in a page full of errors. Does the student understand the teaching wrongly, applying the concepts backward? It’s very possible. Is the student trying to tell you she is bored? Hmmm…we need to pay attention to this.

Are you feeling more confident now in providing tests that ask students to select from just two choices? They can be devised to give you very accurate feedback about the child’s understanding.

The key is in the number of repetitions, but even that can be surprisingly small. Once you start crunching numbers, you can see that tests don’t need to be pages and pages of questions. Go small, add more if needed, and check back with Stattrek.com often to see if you’ve eliminated the probability of guessing. You saw from our examples how a perfect score on only 15 true/false questions is statistically irrefutable as being skill rather than luck!

Let me know if you still think I’m a crazy lady from another planet or if this makes sense. Just leave a comment in the box below…I read them all!

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You might also enjoy reading:

How Do We Reduce the Stress of Testing?

The Best Test for Kids with Motor and Sensory Disabilities 

The Best Test for Kids with Motor and Sensory Disabilities

Even kids with severe disabilities need to demonstrate their learning through tests. As we look at creating low-stress tests to accommodate motor and sensory disabilities, what type of tests should we use? Does one style work better than others for these students?  Let’s talk more about the response style that has the best chance for supporting student success.

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You want your kids to score well on tests.

As a teacher, you work tirelessly to help your students learn content and critical skills. You want to be able to prove to the world just how successful your kids are despite their special needs! That means they need to score as high as possible on classroom tests. We all know that tests play a big role in shaping a child’s educational future. We want our kids to succeed!

Yet no matter how strongly dedicated teachers and parents are, physical challenges still interfere with our students’ abilities to show us what they know. We can’t make these physical problems go away; we have to find a way to work within the same limits our kids face every day.

One standard testing format outshines all the others for accommodating physical disabilities.

To help our kids perform their best on tests, we need to reduce the physical demands of answering test questions. Of the five standard response styles typically used in classroom assessments, one stands far ahead of the others in being accessible to students with severely limited motor skills.

·         Essay—This style of response requires that students generate a lengthy answer, letter-by-letter or word-by-word. For most students with severe motor impairments, essay responses are far too motor-intensive to be practical. Avoid essay questions as a method of testing.

·         Short answer—Students are expected to generate shorter answers, ranging in length from single words or phrases to a sentence or two. When motor disabilities challenge a student, even short answer responses may be too great a demand on physical output. Rather than expecting students to generate answers, short answer questions may be adapted to allow students to choose from a list of words, lessening the motor demand considerably.

·         Multiple choice—This format challenges students to select a response from a list of potential answers. Multiple choice tests are not as easily adapted as one might assume. If we ask students to hold 4-5 possible responses in their heads while they indicate the letter matching the correct response, we ask them to perform a huge memory task. This is a different skill than recalling the information we are trying to draw from our students. If you must use multiple choice tests, ALWAYS assign reminders for each answer choice directly on cards or switches rather than simply labeling them A,B, C, and D.

·         Matching—Matching tests typically ask students to pair items from one column with items in a second column. We might ask them to draw a line to connect the items or copy the letters or numbers that precede each item. Either of these response modes presents a great motor and visual challenge. Instead, print the choices off on colored paper (one color for the prompts and one for the matching choices) and cut them into cards. Students can arrange the matches in pairs on the table, reducing the motor and sensory complexity of this task.

·         True/false, yes/no (aka binary choice)—For kids with motor planning or sensory challenges, this testing strategy far outshines the other four we’ve talked about so far. With only TWO possible responses, this style makes the fewest demands on motor planning. It sharpens cognitive focus by reducing distractions. Think about all the distractions a child has to filter out with a matching or multiple choice task; having only two possible selections reduces this problem greatly. This format makes it easy to present one question at a time, whether by masking off a single question on a page or reading it out loud to the student.

Binary choice tests are bigger than just "true/false."

Test questions that can be answered by choosing from two responses are technically known as “binary choice.” The formats you are most familiar with are probably true/false and yes/no. Questions answered with these right/wrong responses have to be worded with tremendous care, which is a skill in its own right. Poorly worded questions confuse or mislead students. When children lack the verbal skills to ask for clarification, ambiguous wording sets them up for failure. If you need help to write clear questions, refer back to most any Educational Measurement textbook. Ebel and Frisbie’s Essentials of Educational Measurement or Popham’s Modern Educational Measurement are both excellent resources.

The great news is that binary choice options for testing extend past just true/false and yes/no questions. Information can be categorized into columns to clearly demonstrate mastery of the skill being tested. This format has been used in the literacy word with a high degree of success since the 1980’s under the name of “word sorts.” Fortunately for our kids, this sorting format extends to most content areas, varied levels of complexity, and all ages of students. It can be adapted using a wider variety of access methods than most styles of testing.

Sorts used to categorize words starting with /m/

I’m a huge fan of sorts as both a practice and a testing activity. I’ve used them quite often in my classrooms and at home with my motor-challenged daughter. Sorts tend to break down skills into definable increments, making assessments easier to create. I find they direct my instruction leading up to the test so that I focus more intentionally on the objective. I’ve successfully used sorts as an assessment for pre-literate students with autism who needed to have other types of tests given orally—yet whose echolalia interfered with their ability to say anything but the last answer choice they heard. Once they understood the process of sorting answer cards under category headings, they could demonstrate the target skill independently without any verbal input from adults. Their output was now under their control and no longer hampered by echolalia. Recently, my daughter sorted her Agricultural Science vocabulary under the headings of “lactation” and “reproduction” during their dairy unit, showing that sorts are appropriate even through high school.

If you will be testing your students this week, how might you adapt the test to support the motor challenges of your students? Is there a way to convert some of the more complex response styles into simpler binary choice questions? Please leave a comment to let us know how this worked for you this week. Or, feel free to ask for suggestions on how you might accomplish this.

Next week, let’s explore the many ways sorts can be adapted to meet the diverse motor and sensory challenges our kids bring to testing.

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Did you catch last week's post on reducing the stress of testing for students? If not, be sure to check it out here!

 

How Do We Reduce the Stress of Testing?

Creative Commons by Amy McTigue

Let’s face it, testing is stressful. It’s stressful for teachers AND for students.

Think about the stresses that evaluation places on students. They become fearful of failure rather than being free to learn. When this happens, we see students shut down. If their bodies tend to interfere with their output, as is common with conditions like Rett syndrome, the chance for unintended errors increases and elevates stress levels even more, causing the emotion of fear to inhibit cognitive freedom to learn. This, in turn, creates an internal struggle that tends to worsen apraxia and interfere even more greatly with accurate output. It’s a very negative cycle.

At the same time, testing is necessary. Done correctly, it provides helpful information on which we can base solid decisions for planning instruction. It provides feedback to children and their families. It can be a good thing in its rightful place and at appropriate, limited times.

There are a number of challenges to assessing students with severe disabilities that may sound familiar to your student or child:

1.       The lack of verbal speech

2.       The inability to control voluntary movements efficiently, or at all (apraxia)

3.       Performance that varies based on current state of health or sensory processing

4.       Variations in the way others interpret a child’s responses

All these factors make it difficult to use traditional classroom tests. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to talk about how we can address these issues to support success when it comes to assessment. My hope is that this will reduce the stress you feel about assessment.

For now, though, I want to focus on ways to reduce the stress of testing for our students. You might find these strategies help lesson some of your testing stress, too.

1.       Teach, don’t test.  Yes, you need to assess, but for the most part, learning time should be just for that—learning. There is no need to “test” all day long! We don’t do that to typical learners and our kids with disabilities need that same attitude of respect. 

Let kids explore, let them learn from their mistakes. Help kids think of mistakes as learning opportunities. You may have to lead them through this process, but it is an important life skill.  

This is oh-so-true when it comes to learning to communicate. Let natural consequences shape learning. It’s much better to offer a child a bite of less-preferred asparagus (and then let her  use her refusal skills to object!) than it is to tell her, “No, you really meant ice cream.” 

2.       Test the same way you teach. Too often, we test kids using a different response method than they used to practice a skill. What we need to do instead is assess using the same familiar response strategy.

For example, pretend your student is learning to sort objects from smallest to largest. Together you work to line up real objects – toys, cars, fruits, whatever – in size order. You progress to pictures and the child continues to succeed in lining them up from smallest to largest.

The appropriate assessment, then, is to have the student demonstrate size order by lining up a collection of objects or pictures. It is NOT to give a multiple choice question asking which one is the largest! This wasn’t how the child practiced and the skill needed to respond is different from the one he has been rehearsing.

3.       Save testing for “up” times. When a child is off their game, whether due to illness or a sensory issue, save the testing for another day. They may be unable to concentrate on the task you are measuring. To collect data about this skill during such a time isn’t a fair reflection of ability.

This means that when kids are “up,” we need to collect data. There is no promise of a good streak of days leading up to an IEP meeting, so we must have a good bank of data to draw from. This doesn’t mean that we need to be testing continuously on good days though (see #1); it means that during good times we should…

4.       Collect little bits of data often. If you are applying the other principles, you’ll see how this is easily accomplished. You’re going to collect data from a “test” that is similar to the activity used to practice this skill. It isn’t like you have to set aside a special day for testing; in fact, it’s more likely you’ll catch the child on an optimal health and sensory day if you take your cues from the child, rather than the calendar.

So on a good day, when the child feels comfortable inside his own body, you’ll simply keep track of his independent performance on this activity.  From our earlier example of lining up objects from smallest to biggest, he shows you he can line up 4 objects correctly. His data sheet now shows 4/4. How long does this take? A couple minutes? 

In two days, he may repeat this for another 4/4. Next week, there might be 3 opportunities to collect data. When you compile this information, adding up the number of corrects over the number of opportunities, you might get something along the lines of 18/20 or 20/20.   

This data was collected in small bits of time over two weeks. It maximizes the student’s energy and attention levels. It doesn’t feel like a test. He is relaxed and able to perform at his best. You are relaxed too. 

5.       There is no need to label measures of performance as “tests.” For the purpose of your planning and your district, it may be. But we don’t need to pressure students with a loaded word such as “test.” To them, it’s okay if you’re simply writing down numbers about how they did on a task.

These are strategies you can implement today. I’m curious to hear whether your see your student scores improve simply by putting these stress-reducing strategies to work. Please let me know!

AAC Evaluations: Resources to Help You Get Yours Right

There has been much discussion – and grave concern – lately on several online parent lists about AAC evaluations for non-verbal children. Families are asking where they can learn more about the process to make sure evaluations are conducted appropriately.

After all, the stakes are enormous.

Communication is fundamental to the very core of who we are.

Sometimes this basic concept gets buried under all the data collection that is mandated from speech therapists. And sometimes families forget that communication is more than just simplifying life for the caregiver.

An AAC evaluation is a subset of a larger Assistive Technology (AT) evaluation. Because communication is such a critical component impacting every aspect of life and learning, AAC evaluations often become an entity all their own. The rest of the child’s assistive technology needs cannot be ignored, but AAC decisions are so huge, and often so costly, that they are given special separate emphasis.

AAC evaluations need to look at the whole child, not just the tools of expression. Notice I said “tools,” plural, with an S. Notice I also did not say “only a high-tech device.”

There is a trend right now to assume that a single high-tech tool fits all. Don’t get me wrong; this iTool is great and may be able to benefit many, many kids...but that does not mean it is a great tool for every kid.

Families, just because a sleek, new, high-tech iDevice is “cool” does not make it the right fit for every child.

Schools, just because this iDevice is relatively inexpensive does not mean that is the right device for every child either.

Just because a school is comfortable with a specific method (PECS  or PODD or name-your-favorite) or device (one brand, one language access software) does not make it the right fit for every  child.

An AAC evaluation determines the needs of a specific child in the specific environments where he interacts and, from that, matches him with the tool(s) that best meet(s) those needs. Well, that is the method of an AAC evaluation done correctly.

AACTechConnect hosts a list of outstanding resources for AAC evaluations available on the Web. I want to highlight three free resources that are essentials for families. They are also essentials for speech therapists and AT teams...lest we forget the fundamentals of our service.

1. The SETTframework drives home the concept that we look first at the whole Student and their Environment as we consider the Tools that enable them to meet the Tasks expected of them. The rationale for the SETT framework and SETT forms are available through this page. The SETT framework directly addresses some of the problems I mentioned earlier about jumping to conclusions about the benefit of a one-size-fits-all tool.

2.  Wisconsin Assistive Technology Initiative’s Assessing Student Needs for AssistiveTechnology was updated in 2009. At 525 pages, you may not want to read the entire document, although it is excellent! Two outstanding and relevant chapters, both packed with rationale and many useful forms, are Chapter 1 (Assistive Technology Assessment) and Chapter 3 (Assistive Technology for Communication). This is a fantastic resource you don't want to miss!

3. The University ofWashington's site is different from the others in that it doesn’t offer forms or checklists. What it offers is a good discussion on the different levels of communication and ways to help children and adults succeed at each level and progress to the next. It also provides an excellent “crash course” in the basic features of AAC devices that need to be considered. This helps clarify some of the technical jargon in the forms you may find elsewhere.

If you have an AT or AAC evaluation in your near future, take a look at all three resources.

Consider filling out some of these forms yourself based on your observations of your child interacting at home. Share your observations with the school team.

Your home is an environment where your child must be able to interact. Your observations of the needs she has there and how a trial device meets those needs should be considered in an AAC evaluation.

The better we understand the whole child, the better we will be able to match the tools to meet her communication needs. May every child have a way to express him or herself.