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CAST DIRECTOR SEES TECHNOLOGY CHANGING FUNDAMENTAL NOTION OF STUDENTS

October 5, 2000

WASHINGTON -- Thanks in part to assistive technology, special education has moved to new, more inclusive heights over the past 25 years. Now, according to one of the field's leading researchers, technology itself is moving to a higher level. The next 25 years are about "a second stage of technology use, which is much more important for education reform in general. The new tools aren't about fixing students, they're about fixing the environment for learning," says David Rose, founder of the Center for Applied Special Technology, a federally funded pioneer in the field of universal design. "They're about removing a disabling condition that students with disabilities now face in their classrooms."

According to Rose, "Our curricula are broken for most of our students. It's the curricula that needs fixing, not our students."

To this end, technology will help educators and administrators change their notions of what learning is and who learners are, Rose said this week at a Capitol Hill symposium on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Electronic brain imaging, for example, provides visual proof of 20 different ways the brain processes information. "Unfortunately, our schools have focused so much on single ways of knowing that a lot of kids at school have learned only one thing." In reality, he argues, "There is not one typical learner."

If schools adopt this new way of viewing students, new technology will bring the power to reach them, even with the varied disabilities children face. Educational texts are evolving from static, primarily print materials to digital, therefore "malleable," media, Rose says. Where today's books mostly come in the same shape, size and appearance for every student, regardless of how each student learns best, tomorrow's "books" will be digital texts, images, audio, video and networking programs. Information can be transferred from text to speech, speech to text and many other variations to fit the student's abilities.

Similarly, in a digital environment, Rose envisions interventions and specific teaching strategies built into all curriculum materials, to be accessed by individual students as needed. Teachers would no longer have to devise adaptations for specific instances when planning their lessons. With new learning tools, students will be able to focus on engaging with one another and absorbing and expressing information, he says.

Though such tools will likely improve students' educational outcomes even by today's standards, Rose argues technology can and should help educators alter their measurements of a student's success or failure as well. Today's outcome-oriented assessments are and black and white: A student either knows or does not know certain facts, which are usually quantifiable. New interactive assessments will provide specific information about how the student learns, such as which strategies a student uses, which ones do not work, and which elements of the student's learning environment help or hinder that learning.

Using assessment materials that are interactive -- such as computerized exams -- teachers will be able to identify how a student learns best, what his or her abilities are and why the student did not learn certain material. This information will be automatically factored into the curriculum, which will improve and become more appropriate to the student as the interactive materials "learn" the student's strengths and learning methods.

How long will all these seemingly utopian tools take to reach the schools?

Most of the advancements are expected to come through a new federally funded project hosted by CAST called the National Center for Assessing the General Curricula. That project, which pledges to "create a new vision and new practical approaches for access to the general curriculum, including policies, teaching methods and curriculum designs," is funded through 2004. During that time, the center will research the current barriers to students with special needs participating in the general curriculum, consult with other research organizations that are working on new technology and teaching tools and disseminate new strategies and technological solutions to school districts around the country.

The ultimate success of these efforts hinges on an overall shift in society's view of what school is for, according to Rose. Educators need to shift the classroom focus away from stuffing facts and figures into students' heads, he said. "What we need are students who know how to learn, how to learn in a world that's full of information, how to know bad information from good."

A more effective school will do this by recognizing that students are not all the same kind of learners, he added. "Right now, we act as if the job of schooling is to homogenize our students and have them all come out as close to the same as we can," Rose says. "I think that's a very mistaken goal, and I think that the students with disabilities are the ones that are really going to teach us what to do here.

"We need to recognize the value and the centrality for our culture, not only our schools, of the differences amongst us, not trying to focus on the student's weakness as something to be gotten rid of, but to identify strengths and to nurture them."8