Students with dyslexia undergo many difficult experiences during their lifetime. Many students with dyslexia feel like failures which impacts their attitude about academics and how they will deal with difficult situations. Dyslexia impairs a learner’s reading skills like decoding, fluency, and comprehension because a dyslexic learner spends so much energy trying to pronounce and say the letters and sounds correct. It was found that students today are reading and writing with technology when outside of school (Johnson, Adams & Cummins, 2012) and to a different standard in their classrooms.
The Common Core Standards (National Governors Association, 2010), integrates technology into both it’s reading and writing standards. Many professional associations, including the International Reading Association (2009) and the National Council of Teachers of English (2013), recommend that technology be integrated into classroom lessons so that students will be well prepared for the literacy demands of the 21st century (Chesley & Jordon, 2012; Hutchison & Reinking, 2011; Scherer, 2011).
Many people in education affirm that technology will transform teaching practices so that learning activities are more student-centered (Warschauer, 2007) and collaborative (Lei & Zhao, 2008) than classrooms without technology. Technology has even been suggested as the best way to close disparities in the academic achievement between high and low performing students (Wendt, 2013). Intergroup comparison studies have shown that children with specific learning disorders hold lower self-perceptions regarding their abilities than their typically developing peers, especially in an academic setting (Battistutta, Commissaire, & Steffgen, 2018). The diagnostic timing has been found to have an influence on how children perceive or accept their disability (Davenport, 1991).
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The time of their diagnosis relates to the acceptance of dyslexia (Ingesson, 2007) which provides those children who were early-diagnosed to have more time to understand their disability. Rojewski (1999) also found that learning disabilities lead to lower graduation rates and lower educational and occupational aspirations. Students with a learning disability in mathematics struggle with deficits in working memory and long-term memory, and often possess poor organizational skills (Scanlon, 2013). Struggles in these areas often serve as significant barriers to their success with algebra-related content (Geary et al., 2012).
Struggles faced by students with a learning disability in mathematics may be attributed to the instructional manner in which students are conventionally taught. Traditional mathematics instruction tends to be rule-based, with teaching centered on students learning a set of algorithmic procedures using steps to follow (Becker, McLaughlin, Weber, & Gower, 2009). With this approach, less emphasis is placed on students constructing a conceptual understanding of the process being completed (Suh & Moyer, 2008). Students with a learning disability in mathematics would benefit from using technology that provides visual models, dynamic actions, and built in constraints to better understand the underpinnings of mathematical concepts (Satsangi & Bouck, 2014). One such tool shown to assist students with learning disabilities in mathematics is manipulatives (Shin et al.).
Virtual manipulatives offer users greater organization on screen with the layout of each manipulative, whereas concrete manipulatives tend to offer users limited structure and guidance (Bouck et al., 2014). Virtual manipulatives also offer secondary students a more age-appropriate form of assistive technology to aid them with their mathematics learning; whereas concrete manipulatives are commonly used in elementary grades, their use with older populations tends to decrease (Witzel, Mercer, & Miller, 2003).
The decline is often due to the difficulty in finding mathematics manipulatives tailored for instruction in subjects taught in higher grade levels. For example, educators often struggle to find concrete manipulatives that offer stepwise instruction on a range of linear functions taught in algebra (Witzel, 2005). The promise of virtual manipulatives is found in the greater flexibility provided with their use and the larger range of students for whom they target (Moyer-Packenham, Ulmer, & Anderson, 2012). Despite these advantages, virtual manipulatives garner less attention in research compared with the literature base on concrete manipulatives for students with disabilities.
A meta-analysis by Moyer-Packenham and Westenskow (2013) on virtual manipulatives found that of the 66 published studies assessing this technology for mathematics instruction, only three focused on special needs populations. Existing research on virtual manipulatives for students with disabilities include studies teaching basic operations (e.g., Bouck et al., 2014; Peltenburg, Den Heuvel-Panhuizen, & Doig, 2009) and fractions (e.g., Moyer-Packenham et al., 2012; Reimer & Moyer, 2005) to elementary students, and area and perimeter problem-solving skills to secondary students (e.g., Satsangi & Bouck, 2014).
Opinions on the concrete manipulative varied, whereas consensus arose on the virtual manipulative. The issue of providing students with age appropriateness technology must be factored into any decision-making process. For older populations, offering learning aids that distinguish a student from his or her general education peers can have a stigmatizing effect, and negatively affect the student’s academic performance (Finegan & Austin, 2002). Student preference is an important factor that must be weighed into technology adoption (Taber-Doughty, 2005). New technologies are not only transforming the way students view learning, but also transforming the way “educators think about education and literacy” (Pilgrim, Bledsoe, & Reily, 2012).
And “as these tools continue to transform literacy instruction,” they are also helping students “internalize lifelong skills needed for success in this global society” (Saine, 2012). But the journey of integrating technology into the classrooms is not necessarily an easy one. Research has shown that the integration of technology into educational practices has proven to be a complex and slow process. Moeller and Reitzes (2011) have shown that some of the most prevalent barriers to successful integration have included organizational support, teacher attitudes and expectations, and technology itself. Recent research has also shown that the use of technology can facilitate teaching and add critical elements to the learning process. One of these elements is student engagement.
According to Daniels and Pethel (2005), compared to their role in traditional classrooms, students in virtual classrooms “report higher subjective satisfaction … on a number of dimensions, including … overall quality of educational experience,” and “the more they judge the experience to be collaborative, the more likely they are to judge the outcomes as superior to the traditional classroom” (Daniels and Pethel, 2005). Teachers who use technology in their classrooms “claim that when students are engaged in digital literacy activities,” they “become more creative in their thinking” (Saine, 2012). Another reason for using new technologies in the classroom, is the fact that digital technology is part of everyday life for this generation of learners. Gawelek et al. (2011) state that “no matter their economic status, they know the world wide web, social media, and entertainment technologies such as film, music, and games as consistent and constant components of everyday experience” (Gawelek, 2011).
In order to equip the next generation of learners with the necessary skills for their future, there is an urgent need to redefine literacy and reintroduce it by incorporating technology into almost every aspect of the lesson (Green, 2005; McClanahan, Williams, Kennedy, & Tate, 2012; Motteram, 2011; Saine, 2012). Children will become more engaged in learning to read when they have opportunities to creatively use technology. This is not to deny the importance of skill instruction or a balanced perspective in teaching them, but access to the digital technologies will more likely foster critical thinking and deeper cognitive engagement when children can compose, construct, and create new ideas and use new forms with them (McDermott and Gormley, 2016).
References
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