Investigating the use of coreboards by children with developmental disabilities and teachers in a school environment.

Abstract

Coreboards have become popular as an aid for individuals with disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who may have issues with speech-language production, but who also often lack more fundamental functional communication skills. The aims of this study were to explore the extent coreboards as an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) were a useful tool for children with developmental disabilities and their teachers to communicate independently and functionally, if they were used effectively in the school environment, if they were used for their intended purpose, and if they were used to facilitate functional communication skills for children with developmental disabilities. The research in this project involved data collection on student and teacher communicative behaviour. The participants in this study were three children aged 9 to 10 with developmental disabilities and their teacher and learning support assistants. The study is a mixed-methods descriptive design and data was collected by direct observations being recorded on a data sheet. The main findings are the student participants did use the coreboard for independent communication as they each individually initiated with the coreboard less than 3% of the time and two of the student participants purpose of initiating use of the coreboard was unknown over half the time. Furthermore, if the adult participants are unable to determine what the purpose of the coreboard use is from the student participants, then the communication act will not be successful as the adult participant will not be able to respond appropriately to the student participant and the lack of success will discourage the student participants from initiating in the future.