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PubMedDate not supplied

Comparison of the learnability and retention between Blissymbols and CyberGlyphs.

BACKGROUND: There are a variety of graphic symbol sets/systems (GSSs) currently used in the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Various characteristics of these graphic symbol systems affect learnability and should be considered in order to make a meaningful match between the user of AAC and the system. Although a variety of studies on learnability of graphic systems have been conducted in the past, all studies conducted included participants from Western countries. AIMS: To compare two symbol systems, namely Blissymbolics and CyberGlyphs in terms of learnability. To identify the overall performance between Blissymbolics and CyberGlyphs in terms of the percentage of symbols correctly identified at the various stages. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: A quasi-experimental crossover design between groups was carried out on two homogeneous groups of typically developing, Northern Sotho-speaking children. Data were obtained by teaching 80 different referents (40 from each symbol system) to 50 Northern Sotho speaking regular students from South Africa, ranging from grade 4 to 6. The participants were tested on symbol recognition at four different stages: after initial training, after a revision period, after a 7-day withdrawal period and after 30 days of withdrawal. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: The overall results indicated that the ease of learning and memory retention of the CyberGlyphs were higher than that of Blissymbols, irrespective of the group or the sequence of exposure. Possible reasons for the differences are discussed. CyberGlyphs seem to be more accessible as the symbols in general seem to be more detailed and also are meant to be hand drawn rather than computer or stencil produced. Within this context, CyberGlyphs could be easier to access visually than Blissymbolics, especially for children who do not have extensive experience in dealing with geometric shapes, particularly for the children who do not come from rich literacy backgrounds or who do not have rich visual perceptual experiences to draw from. CONCLUSIONS: Even though initial learning might be faster for CyberGlyphs than for Blissymbolics in certain populations, there may be other factors to consider when making a choice between the two graphic symbol systems. Within the clinical setting CyberGlyphs can provide the individual who uses AAC with a more user-friendly system as an entrance to the use of other graphic symbol systems. This may be especially important in contexts where issues surrounding poverty and lack of early exposure to literacy exist.

Child↗
PubMed2006

Twenty-first century learning in school systems: the case of the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, Indiana.

To empower students with skills such as information and technological literacy, global awareness and cultural competence, self-direction, and sound reasoning, teachers must master these skills themselves. This chapter examines how the Digital Age Literacy Initiative of the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is funded by the Lilly Endowment, incorporated twenty-first century learning through a systemic approach involving teacher training and the use of data. The authors explain the district's content, process, and context goals toward accomplishing its mission of empowering students with the necessary twenty-first century skills to succeed in the digital age. The district places a strong emphasis on professional development for teachers. To support the necessary teacher learning and therefore sustain the work of the initiative, the district has adopted action research, self-assessment, and an online professional development network. To support teachers in implementing new strategies, master teachers serve as digital age literacy coaches. The chapter discusses the initiative's focus on evidence of progress. Through a partnership with the Metiri Group of California, the district has built a range of assessments including online inventories and twenty-first century skill rubrics. For example, the Mankato Survey collected teacher and student data around access, ability, and use of technology in the classroom in 2001 and then in 2004. This research showed significant gains in some technologies across all grade levels and consistent gains in nearly all technologies for middle and high school students. As it moves into the next phase of implementing the Digital Age Literacy Initiative, the district embraces the systemic shifts in school culture necessary to institutionalize twenty-first century learning.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Use of the internet as a resource for consumer health information: results of the second osteopathic survey of health care in America (OSTEOSURV-II).

BACKGROUND: The Internet offers consumers unparalleled opportunities to acquire health information. The emergence of the Internet, rather than more-traditional sources, for obtaining health information is worthy of ongoing surveillance, including identification of the factors associated with using the Internet for this purpose. OBJECTIVES: To measure the prevalence of Internet use as a mechanism for obtaining health information in the United States; to compare such Internet use with newspapers or magazines, radio, and television; and to identify sociodemographic factors associated with using the Internet for acquiring health information. METHODS: Data were acquired from the Second Osteopathic Survey of Health Care in America (OSTEOSURV-II), a national telephone survey using random-digit dialing within the United States during 2000. The target population consisted of adult, noninstitutionalized, household members. As part of the survey, data were collected on: facility with the Internet, sources of health information, and sociodemographic characteristics. Multivariate analysis was used to identify factors associated with acquiring health information on the Internet. RESULTS: A total of 499 (64% response rate) respondents participated in the survey. With the exception of an overrepresentation of women (66%), respondents were generally similar to national referents. Fifty percent of respondents either strongly agreed or agreed that they felt comfortable using the Internet as a health information resource. The prevalence rates of using the health information sources were: newspapers or magazines, 69%; radio, 30%; television, 56%; and the Internet, 32%. After adjusting for potential confounders, older respondents were more likely than younger respondents to use newspapers or magazines and television to acquire health information, but less likely to use the Internet. Higher education was associated with greater use of newspapers or magazines and the Internet as health information sources. Internet use was lower in rural than urban or suburban areas. CONCLUSIONS: The Internet has already surpassed radio as a source of health information but still lags substantially behind print media and television. Significant barriers to acquiring health information on the Internet remain among persons 60 years of age or older, those with 12 or fewer years of education, and those residing in rural areas. Stronger efforts are needed to ensure access to and facility with the Internet among all segments of the population. This includes user-friendly access for older persons with visual or other functional impairments, providing low-literacy Web sites, and expanding Internet infrastructure to reach all areas of the United States.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Interaction patterns between children and their teachers when using a specific multimedia and communication strategy: observations from children with autism and mixed intellectual disabilities.

This study reports on observed interaction patterns between 20 children with autism and mixed intellectual disabilities (mean chronological age = 11:4 years; language age = 4:7 years) and their nine teachers working with a specially developed multimedia program aiming to increase literacy skills. An increase in verbal expression was found over time for the total group. Children with autism also showed increased enjoyment and willingness to seek help from their teachers. Teachers for both diagnostic groups reduced their instructions on how to handle the computer during the program but the decrease was greater in the teachers for children with autism. When the total group of children was subdivided according to language age (high versus low), it appears that those with a low language age showed an increase in verbal expressiveness from start to end of training. Those with a high language age showed increased enjoyment. It is concluded that more detailed studies of the interaction patterns between teachers and children are needed, and these should be related to children's language level as well as to diagnostic group.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Heuristic evaluation of a Web-based Educational Resource for low literacy NICU parents.

"Web-based Educational Resources for the NICU Parent," an educational website for low literacy families, was developed and implemented as prototype web pages using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Research has shown that evaluating a website before its implementation can reduce usability errors and improve the overall interface design. As an initial assessment of the website's interface, a heuristic evaluation was conducted with a sample of three usability experts. The usability experts reviewed the website with typical case scenario and completed an evaluation form covering ten usability heuristics. The task was completed in approximately one and a half hours; 82 heuristic violations were reported. The heuristic violations noted on the evaluation forms and the experts' verbalizations captured by a usability testing tool (Morae) were content analyzed and categorized based on the potential design solutions to be implemented: function, design and layout, content, and navigation. Approximately 88% of the violations were resolved by implementing these solutions. The study findings suggest that the heuristic evaluation was an efficient and inexpensive method for evaluating the low literacy interface of the "Web-based Educational Resources for the NICU Parent."

Comprehension↗
PubMed2001

Pictures to print: a software scaffold to written literacy.

BACKGROUND: Successful school placements require effective written literacy skills. When a student has traumatic brain injury (TBI), written literacy instruction may need to be individualized and intense to facilitate optimal reintegration into the school program. Software products can provide a method that assists in creating the needed individualized, intense experiences. Written literacy-learning experiences span a continuum from preconventional messages expressed through pictures, to conventional printed expressions designed to convey meaning, to the literate writing needed to create stories and reports. DESIGN: This article is designed to familiarize rehabilitation and research professionals in TBI with the range of written literacy software and to stimulate clinical applications and research related to their use with students who have sustained a TBI.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Text generation from Taiwanese Sign Language using a PST-based language model for augmentative communication.

This paper proposes a novel approach to the generation of Chinese sentences from ill-formed Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) for people with hearing impairments. First, a sign icon-based virtual keyboard is constructed to provide a visualized interface to retrieve sign icons from a sign database. A proposed language model (LM), based on a predictive sentence template (PST) tree, integrates a statistical variable n-gram LM and linguistic constraints to deal with the translation problem from ill-formed sign sequences to grammatical written sentences. The PST tree trained by a corpus collected from the deaf schools was used to model the correspondence between signed and written Chinese. In addition, a set of phrase formation rules, based on trigger pair category, was derived for sentence pattern expansion. These approaches improved the efficiency of text generation and the accuracy of word prediction and, therefore, improved the input rate. For the assessment of practical communication aids, a reading-comprehension training program with ten profoundly deaf students was undertaken in a deaf school in Tainan, Taiwan. Evaluation results show that the literacy aptitude test and subjective satisfactory level are significantly improved.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Learning resource needs of UK NHS support staff.

BACKGROUND: A report on the findings of research into the learning resource needs of support staff conducted at York Hospital. METHODS: A qualitative method of focus groups was used to explore the views and experiences of support staff. This provided a rich source of data and allowed an often overlooked group to give their own experiences of learning and libraries. This was supplemented by one-to-one interviews using more in-depth questions. A literacy and numeracy test gave a general picture of essential skill levels within the sample group. RESULTS: An improvement in communication to support staff needs to take place to ensure that all support staff know about the library, how and where to access training and obtain a network computer password. The project confirmed the need to expand library resources for support staff. It was found that there were no obvious essential skills resources within the Trust and a lack of awareness of essential skill issues. CONCLUSION: The learning needs of support staff need to be addressed sensitively. Many have had unfavourable experiences. Lack of access to computers and information technology (IT) training contributed to the group favouring written communication. More work needs to be done on essential skills for all staff.

Allied Health Personnel↗
PubMed1997

Computer-assisted self-interviewing: a multimedia approach to dietary assessment.

Currently available dietary assessment tools have limited ability to obtain valid data within the resource constraints of large-scale studies. Many obstacles to gathering data can be overcome with computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI). Computers can conduct personalized, in-depth interviews without interviewers; provide standardized data collection with appropriate levels of probing; automate data entry; encourage subjects to review and correct inconsistent data; and ensure that responses are complete. Interactive multimedia tools can motivate subjects and improve participation. Visual and aural cues may stimulate recall and improve data quality. CASI is appropriate for use in populations in which literacy is low and in multiple ethnic groups. A prototype CASI diet-history program was developed for use in the United States. The diet-history approach was selected to improve cognitive support and capture information on usual diet. Scripts were based on recorded interviews with dietitians and interviewers from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. At the end of the interview, participants are given information on how their reported nutrient intakes compare with current recommendations for their age and sex. The prototype was tested in focus groups of mixed age, sex, ethnicity, and education, with encouraging results. The development of multimedia-based dietary assessment tools seems a logical next step in improving dietary assessment methods.

Computers↗
PubMed1985

A new nutrient index for measuring nutritional well-being of Indian states.

A composite nutrient index was computed for ten states of India by using principal component analysis based on the average intake of eight nutrients, namely protein, calories, iron, vitamin A, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and vitamin C. The new nutrient index is significant from a nutritional point of view in a community or a country. Two factors from the list of eight variables and the matrix of factor loadings after making orthogonal rotation have been extracted and named as the Energy Factor and the Vitamin Factor. The PQLI was computed for ten Indian States and a rank correlation of the nutrient index and PQLI was computed. The rank correlation was not significant. A negative significant regression coefficient of the value of food consumption with the nutrient index was found in the regression equation. Further statistical analysis of the energy factor with independent variables reconfirmed a very high negative relationship between the GINI Coefficient and the degree of literacy. The higher the literacy levels the lower were the intake of nutrients.

Diet↗
PubMed2001

Software and speech--a review of software in phonology therapy.

A review of software was carried out to evaluate to what extent particular titles could be used within a phonological therapy programme using a psycholinguistic approach for children aged between four and seven years. Some of the software had been developed specifically for speech and language therapists working with children's phonological impairments. Other titles were from the education market and aimed at developing children's literacy skills. This paper describes how these software programmes could be used to address phonological impairments through developing the sub-skills described within the psycholinguistic framework.

Humans↗
PubMed1999

Phonology, reading acquisition, and dyslexia: insights from connectionist models.

The development of reading skill and bases of developmental dyslexia were explored using connectionist models. Four issues were examined: the acquisition of phonological knowledge prior to reading, how this knowledge facilitates learning to read, phonological and nonphonological bases of dyslexia, and effects of literacy on phonological representation. Compared with simple feedforward networks, representing phonological knowledge in an attractor network yielded improved learning and generalization. Phonological and surface forms of developmental dyslexia, which are usually attributed to impairments in distinct lexical and nonlexical processing "routes," were derived from different types of damage to the network. The results provide a computationally explicit account of many aspects of reading acquisition using connectionist principles.

Child↗
PubMed2005

Auditory temporal information processing in preschool children at family risk for dyslexia: relations with phonological abilities and developing literacy skills.

In this project, the hypothesis of an auditory temporal processing deficit in dyslexia was tested by examining auditory processing in relation to phonological skills in two contrasting groups of five-year-old preschool children, a familial high risk and a familial low risk group. Participants were individually matched for gender, age, non-verbal IQ, school environment, and parental educational level. Psychophysical thresholds were estimated for gap-detection, frequency modulation detection, and tone-in-noise detection using a three-interval forced-choice adaptive staircase paradigm embedded within a computer game. Phonological skills were measured by tasks assessing phonological awareness, rapid serial naming, and verbal short-term memory. Significant group differences were found for phonological awareness and letter knowledge. In contrast, none of the auditory tasks differentiated significantly between both groups. However, both frequency modulation and tone-in-noise detection were significantly related to phonological awareness. This relation with phonological skills was not present for gap-detection.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2003

Hepatitis B and you: a patient education resource for pregnant women and new mothers.

An educational tool, Hepatitis B and You, has been designed to encourage women who test positive for hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection during pregnancy to become active participants in the care required to prevent perinatal HBV transmission to their infants. Hepatitis B and You presents information at a sixth-grade reading level and uses educational strategies that are known to work with people who have low literacy skills. Preliminary evaluation shows that 86% of respondents reported that their knowledge about hepatitis B improved after reading the slide set, 85% that the information was helpful, and 95% that the format was easy to follow.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.↗
PubMed2004

The role of video technology in on-line lectures for the deaf.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to determine the effectiveness of web-based video lectures on demand for the deaf in comparison to the traditional method of teaching using a sign language interpreter. The web-based lectures presented are specifically designed for the deaf in education and in rehabilitation. METHOD: Sixty-three deaf students and adults were divided into four groups. All of the groups were made up of users who shared similar knowledge in the field of computers, but with different abilities in using computers, from beginners to advanced users. All of the groups were of mixed gender. The first two groups (consisting of 23 test users) graded the usability of the user interface for web-based lecture on demand with the help of the standardized SUMI questionnaire. After that, two groups (20 students from high school and 20 adults) joined in a 45-min informational program on the history of the deaf. Both groups were then divided into two smaller subgroups of 10 participants. The first subgroup in the first part of the learning program followed a traditional teaching style with the help of a teacher and an interpreter for Slovenian sign language. Meanwhile, the second group observed a 12-min web-based video lecture on demand and still had available an additional 18 min for a more detailed observation of the video. At the end of the lecture, the teacher used the questionnaire to review the participants' understanding of the content of the lecture in both of the groups. During the entire testing period, the interpreter used Slovenian sign language. RESULTS: By using the SUMI questionnaire, we determined the usability of the user interface for comprehension and gathering of knowledge. We discovered that the system was usable according to the standards. The global Median results (Global Median=51) were in the range of 50. In the second part of testing, we determined the level of significance between the traditional and web-based lectures. The results were statistically evaluated using the t-tests and the ANOVA test. From the t-tests we established the hypothesis that the number of correct answers for both groups (group 1: web-based, group 2: traditional) differed. The t-test used for the age groups rejected the hypothesis that the number of correct answers for both groups differed, where group 1 was comprised of adults and group 2 was comprised of students. Additionally, the ANOVA test showed that the number of correct answers for adults using traditional lectures differed significantly from the number of correct answers for both adult and student web-based users. The ANOVA test showed no differences between any of the remaining groups. CONCLUSIONS: We can conclude that for deaf people it is extremely important to introduce the use of information and communications technology on all levels of education and rehabilitation. This increases their ability to learn and improves their understanding of learning materials, especially if the applications are designed specifically for their needs. Through daily exposure to a larger number of such materials, we can positively influence the literacy (reading and writing skills) of the deaf. With increased literacy, the deaf would be able to read literature, and subtitles, enabling them to receive information through written sources. Therefore, we can expect them to have a higher self-esteem, more easily integrate into society and have more opportunities for employment.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

A winning combination: women, literacy, and participation in health care.

Health information materials written at the appropriate reading level help individuals manage their own health care. In this study, we assessed the reading ability of clients and readability of the patient information materials at a rural women's health clinic. We administered a reading comprehension test to 50 subjects and tested the patient education materials using a readability formula. More than one in six women could not read all of the patient information, which could limit their understanding, and achievement of good health care. Commercially available materials can be checked readily for reading level using software installed in most computers. This software also allows clinicians who prepare their own materials for their patients to generate versions that are appropriate for different reading levels.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Dedicated online virtual reference instruction.

To facilitate nursing students' information literacy skills and enhance traditional library user services, academic librarians have developed synchronous (real-time) online virtual reference instruction in nursing research classes. The authors discuss collaborative efforts of nursing and library faculty in planning, implementing, and evaluating a discipline-specific virtual reference pilot program.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗