Episode 210: Kris Brock: Using Animated Symbols to Improve AAC Instruction & Comprehension

This week, Chris interviews Dr. Kris Brock, an Assistant Professor at Idaho State University, and President-Elect of Idaho Speech Hearing Association. Dr. Brock shares about his fascinating research into using animated AAC symbols for verbs and prepositions to improve symbol comprehension and reduce the time it takes to teach abstract words. Dr. Brock shares why using animations can be so powerful, why verbs and prepositions are the most important to animate, and why teaching verbs can happen naturally by simply showing the animations. 

Before the interview, Chris and Rachel talk about animated GIFs and how they can be used in therapy. Rachel likes to use them to build literacy and to work on verbs in a way that is fun and motivating. Rachel finds GIFs with her client that the client loves, and they work on core words and literacy using that favorite character. Rachel shares about collections of GIFs for sale at her site at rachelmadel.com/shop

Note - be careful searching for GIFs in real time with kids, as some content on sites like giphy.com are not appropriate for them. Choosing GIFs ahead of time may be a better choice in some circumstances.

Key ideas this week:

🔑 Animated graphic line drawings are powerful tools, because they attract the kid’s attention, convey information about a process from beginning to end, and portray completion of a procedure.

🔑 Verbs and prepositions are the most important to animate, since they are more abstract and cannot be fully captured from beginning to end with only one static image.

🔑 If you target the verbs, you get the nouns for free. If you teach syntax and you teach verbs, then you don’t have to specifically target the nouns, that will happen naturally.

🔑 Dr. Brock’s research, which studied typically developing children, showed there was a 20 - 30% increase in successful interpretation of a 5 symbol sequence when the verb and preposition were animated.