Chapter 2
Rapid Literature Review on AT in Education
A rapid review, sometimes referred to as a scoping review, is a process of systematically mapping a body of literature in order to produce information in an expedited timeframe. The intent of a rapid review is to engage in a broad search to gather as many types of documents as possible concerning the topic of interest. Subsequent analysis focuses on identifying the key concepts, theories, sources of evidence, and gaps in the research in order to contextualise the knowledge.
This rapid review literature project was conducted over an ten-week period beginning in February 2020. The activities involved gathering, reviewing, and synthesising the existing research evidence from the period of 2005 through 2019 concerning the use and effectiveness of assistive technology (AT) by pupils and students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). This chapter provides a brief overview of the methodologies used by the project. Readers interested in the technical details of this work are encouraged to consult the companion web site (https://www.knowledge-by-design.com/ukat/).
The design, marketing, and use of assistive technology must be understood in the context of technology used in schools (i.e., educational technology) as well as technology used in society (i.e., mainstream technology). The theoretical framework for the project is illustrated in Figure 1.
The theoretical framework is foundational for the research given that a specific technology may or may not be labeled as assistive technology since the function of all technology is to function as a tool that extends the user’s performance. Second, since many pupils and students with special educational needs and disabilities are served in inclusive classrooms, it is necessary to understand the general technologies they may encounter in these environments. Finally, since mainstream technologies increasingly incorporate universal design for learning (UDL) principles into product design, some functions that formerly required specialised assistive technology can now be found in off-the-shelf products such as laptop, tablet, and smartphone operating systems and web browsers.
Figure 1 Understanding Assistive Technology in the Context of Technology Used in Schools and Society |
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The purpose of this study was to investigate the following three primary research questions:
#1: What are the characteristics of the assistive technology evidence base?
#2: What is presently known about assistive technology use by pupils and students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)?
#3: What is most effective when it comes to AT implementation and use?
Each question will be examined in detail in a subsequent chapter.
The scope of the project was operationalised using the parameters outlined in Table 1. In summary, the project focused on gathering evidence from the academic databases, doctoral dissertations, and grey literature (i.e., non-indexed journals, conference papers, and technical reports) from the years 2005 to 2019. The goal was to understand both the state of the art (as reflected in literature for practitioners), and the state of the science (as reflected in peer-reviewed research literature), concerning AT use and the outcomes and benefits experienced by pupils and students with SEND. The review focused on evidence in four English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States because of the similarity of their educational systems; economies; and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
| Table 1 Project Parameters | |
|---|---|
Parameter |
Variables |
| Period | • source materials published from 2005 through 2019 |
| Language | • source materials must be available in English |
| Format | • source materials must be available in full-text format |
| Localisation | • source materials must be from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States |
| Exclusionary Content | • blog entries |
| • book reviews | |
| • editorials and special issue introductions | |
| • program/product profiles [adverts, reviews, profiles] | |
| Exclusionary Exceptionalities | • gifted and talented students |
| • other health impaired | |
| Exclusionary Technologies | • cochlear implant; hearing aids |
| • eyeglasses | |
| • wheelchairs; seating and positioning | |
Seven commercial literature databases were identified as indexing literature relevant to research and practice concerning assistive technology: Academic Search Complete, CINAHL Plus, Education Research Complete, Educational Resources Information Center, MedlinePlus, PsycINFO, and Web of Science.
Supplementary Information
The literature search process was optimized by the discovery that the publisher EBSCO owned 6 of the targeted databases that made it possible to (a) use a single interface to execute a search query across Academic Search Complete, CINAHL Plus, Education Research Complete, ERIC, MEDLINE, and PsycINFO, and (b) automatically remove duplicate citations from the found set. Furthermore, searches within Web of Science were executed across 8 databases within its Core Collection.
AT is not a single unidimensional construct. The 22 different search terms used in this study reflect the diversity of the AT discipline such that there are broad concepts of interest (e.g., AT assessment, AT outcomes) as well as specific types of special needs and disabilities (e.g., specific learning disability). Table 2 summarises two groups of search constructs that were used to operationalise the literature searches: (1) disability constructs, and (2) assistive technology constructs. The core terms were implemented with appropriate wild cards to ensure that multiple forms of the key words were found (i.e., dis* retrieves both disability and disabilities).
| Table 2 Search Constructs | ||
|---|---|---|
Construct |
UK Variables |
US Variables |
| Disability (RQ2) | specific learning difficulty | specific learning disability |
| moderate learning difficulty | specific learning disability, intellectual disability |
|
| severe learning difficulty | specific learning disability, intellectual disability | |
| profound and multiple learning difficulty | intellectual disability | |
| social, emotional and mental health | emotional/behavioral disturbance | |
| speech language and communication needs | speech or language impairment | |
| hearing impairment | hearing impairment (including deafness) | |
| visual impairment | visual impairment (including blindness) | |
| multi-sensory impairment | deaf-blindness, traumatic brain injury | |
| physical disability | physical disability | |
| autistic spectrum disorder | autism | |
Construct |
Variables |
Exemplars |
| Assistive Technology (RQ3) | AT advocacy | advocacy, AT child find, awareness, transitions |
| AT assessment | need for AT, assessment, trialing, evaluation, selection, accessibility, usability | |
| AT decision-making | AT consideration, AT teams, IEP team | |
| AT devices | products considered to be AT | |
| AT services | services, supports | |
| AT outcomes | bandonment, efficacy of AT systems, benefits, AT & employment, quality indicators, return on investment, stigmatization, user satisfaction | |
| AT personnel | AT certification, licensure, competencies, ethics, knowledge and skills, personal preparation (pre-service and in-service) | |
| AT policy | AT laws, court rulings, legal analysis, policy statements, standards | |
| AT research and development | cloud-based AT, development, evidence reviews, innovation, Internet of Things (IoT), AT & machine learning, new product development | |
| Service delivery: accessible educational materials | access to the curriculum, accessible educational materials (AEM), accessible instructional materials (AIM) |
|
| Service delivery: universal design for learning | access for all, universal accessibility | |
| AT theory | theoretical frameworks | |
The literature search process was conducted in the following sequence in order to (a) determine whether additional modifications to the search protocol would be necessary before scaling the process, and (b) to facilitate the management of search results that were likely to return similar types of documents within a cluster. The Principal Investigator conducted each of the searches in clusters 1-5 and the Project Coordinator conducted the searches in clusters 6-7.
Cluster #1: traumatic brain injury
Cluster #2: sensory impairments (visual impairment, blindness, hearing impairment, deafness)
Cluster #3: developmental disabilities (autism, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities)
Cluster #4: high-incidence disabilities (emotional/behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, speech language and communication)
Cluster #5: AT constructs (see list in Table 2)
Cluster # 6: grey literature
Cluster #7: doctoral dissertations
The numeric results of each search were recorded on a worksheet. Each item was visually scanned to determine whether or not the entry met the inclusion criteria. If the item was initially deemed as meeting the inclusionary criteria, efforts were made to secure a PDF copy of the document. In a majority of the cases, this was readily available through the academic databases from two university libraries. In other cases, it meant connecting to the journal web site to locate a copy. In situations where the documents were considered potentially important, but apparently unavailable (e.g., embargoed), a request for the article was made through a university inter-library loan service who achieved a 100% success rating in obtaining the document within 1-10 days.
To build a citation base for the project, the title of each relevant document was entered into Google Scholar to obtain the APA formatted citation. In many cases, the Google citation contained errors that needed to be manually corrected or missing information that needed to be located (e.g., conference proceedings, volume/issue). The full citation was then saved in a topical file as well as in the master project database.
After the document citation was recorded, the Cited by button within Google Scholar was utilised to identify potentially other relevant works (e.g., connected to the target article by the fact that it cited this previous work). This technique, known as forward chaining, provided clear evidence about the impact of a found article by recording the number of subsequent citations to the document as well as the impact of the future works on the topic. Needless to say, this process was very time consuming and involved a good deal of discretion to determine the value-add of including more recent publications on a topic and when to cease the process.
Each relevant document was identified using the naming convention: lastnameYEAR.pdf and saved in a topical folder, a master document folder, and a cloud-based storage system to ensure the redundancy and security of the data. In addition, each PDF was entered into a reference citation management tool to provide the research team with full-text indexing of each word within every document as well as access to real-time statistics about the citation count, links to other articles that have cited the work, and more.
Each document was reviewed by the project staff and coded using a pre-defined set of metadata. Every document, and its metadata, were reviewed by the Principal Investigator when data for each document were entered into the master database. The full-text database of documents and project database of citations and metadata were used to compile the final report. By the conclusion of the project, 968 documents were identified for analysis. Readers interested in exploring the data set are encouraged to visit the companion web site (https://www.knowledge-by-design.com/ukat/) to conduct their own topical searches in a web-based version of the dataset.
Supplementary Information
In the end the project included 95 articles (9.8%) where the first author was not a citizen of the four target countries. On a case-by-case basis this decision was deemed acceptable if the content involved significant research and development innovation, a literature review, or other noteworthy contribution that did not involve school-based experimental research that could limit generalization.
At the outset of the project, the intent of the search protocol was to follow the PRISMA guidelines. This protocol was abandoned given the complexity of conducting 22 database searches that were further supplemented by searchers within Google Scholar.
Training was provided to the Project Coordinator and two Research Assistants about how to apply the metadata codes to each article. The Principal Investigator review the metadata coding for every article during a Quality Assurance process.
Given that the purpose of a rapid review of the literature is to explore a large body of literature over a short period of time, the fundamental task requires the researcher to reconcile precision (that is, how useful the search results are) vs. recall (that is, how complete the results are) within the constraints of time, human energy, and analytic power. Therefore, while a significant body of literature was identified in this study, it is highly probable that key documents were overlooked. Furthermore, given that the majority of project effort focused on locating and capturing relevant documents, the time available for analysis was significantly constrained. Therefore, there is much more to be learned from this dataset.
Interested readers are encouraged to contact the Principal Investigator Dave Edyburn, Ph.D, <edyburn@uwm.edu> to explore collaborations that may uncover patterns still hidden within the corpus.
Supplementary Information
Future researchers are encouraged to extend the metadata codebook developed in this study. Particular attention should focus on the identification of similar terms that have been used to describe the same construct during different time periods, such as:
mainstreaming --> inclusion
mental retardation --> intellectual disabilities
portable computers --> hand-held computers --> tablet computers --> mobile technologies
Furthermore, much more attention must be devoted to taxonomies for classifying non-research literature. In this study, we found a significant body of literature that needed to code as expert opinion because the author presented how-to information based on professional opinion or limited citations to works in the professional literature.
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