Although most agree that the use of technology in the classroom holds tremendous promise, researchers debate how best to incorporate these innovations into classroom practice, especially for students with cognitive and physical disabilities.
One aspect of this debate is philosophical: Should technology focus on circumventing or on remediating a student's disability? At a 1993 symposium, panelists characterized these two perspectives as the holistic/constructivist view—technology should be used to accentuate students' strengths—and the scientific/empirical view—technology is better suited to helping students strengthen their cognitive and academic deficits (Raskind et al. 1995).
For example, said Raskind, for students with a reading disability, holistic/constructivists might recommend a computer with a speech synthesizer. By programming the device to read a book aloud, the teacher circumvents the disability. By contrast, scientific/empiricists might favor using a computer for "instruction and practice in phonological awareness and context-free word identification skills."
This debate highlights the complexity of incorporating technology into classroom practice.
DECtalk or Not DECtalk
DECtalk, a high-quality speech synthesizer produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation, provides a case in point. The teacher can program DECtalk to read aloud passages or individual words, to sound out syllables, or to give feedback on a student's spelling.
Wise and Olson (1994) used DECtalk with a sample of middle school students with reading problems. Each day the students read stories directly on their computer screen, asking the computer's help in deciphering words they did not understand or recognize.
For one group, DECtalk was programmed to speak the whole word aloud, while for three other groups, DECtalk sounded out the syllables. At semester's end, the students took the Peabody Individualized Achievement Test. The results showed little difference among the groups using DECtalk, but a significant difference between the DECtalk students and a control group reading as usual. Each group of DECtalk students gained an average of about a .6 grade level in word recognition skills, whereas the control group gained only a .3 grade level on average.
Not all uses of DECtalk have enjoyed the same success. For example, Leong (1995) conducted two studies with students with reading problems. One group read a passage on-screen while DECtalk read it aloud—a technique called auding. Three other groups used auding with another technique, such as having DECtalk read difficult words aloud and explain them.
Pre- and post-test results led Leong to conclude that "computer-mediated reading, with or without DECtalk, may not be superior to offline reading." Leong emphasized that this was not an indictment of DECtalk technology; merely a caution to researchers to first "specify the conditions under which the approach works well, and the kinds of students, reading materials, reading processes, and other variables that are most amenable to this technology."
The Human Component
Teachers should consider all the variables before adopting a technological innovation, just as they would with any new teaching strategy. Among these variables are the technology's flexibility, how soon it may be out of date, and, indeed, whether it is needed at all. As Howell (1996) warns, in our rush to obtain increasingly sophisticated equipment, we may fail to take full advantage of existing tools.
This brings us to the importance of training teachers to reap the full benefits of existing technology. No matter how sophisticated the equipment, it is virtually useless without thoughtful implementation by knowledgeable practitioners.
