| Individuals with complex communication needs who require the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems (e.g., communication boards, computerized voice-output systems) have the right to a full and appropriate public education. Unfortunately, current research indicates that students who use AAC are often not given opportunities to participate in appropriate educational and literacy programs. This serious problem, in part, is due to a lack of evidence-based procedures for teaching educational personnel to provide students who use AAC with meaningful opportunities to communicate during classroom activities. To address this critical problem, the current study implemented a single-subject, multiple baseline across subjects design, to investigate the effects of an educational assistant instructional program on the communicative turns of students who use AAC during book reading activities. The study included five educational assistants and five preschool and school-aged children who used AAC. The educational assistants were taught to implement an interaction strategy involving: (a) increased conversational pause time, (b) AAC system modeling, (c) open-ended question asking, and (d) increased responsivity to target student utterances. Instruction was implemented in accordance with current principles of best practice in strategy instruction and lasted a maximum of 3.5 hours. All five educational assistants reached criterion for implementation of the targeted interaction strategy in book reading activities and also evidenced generalized and long-term use of this strategy. Additionally, all five target students demonstrated increases in communicative turns taken and semantic concepts expressed across activities and time. Results, clinical implications, and future research directions are discussed. |
