Episode 225: Meredith Gohsman: Evaluating the Effectiveness of AAC Camps

This week, Chris and Rachel interview Dr. Meredith Gohsman about her research into how much progress in using their device the AAC users made during a 4 week AAC camp. Each AAC user received aided language stimulation and was prompted using the least-to-most prompting hierarchy. Meredith’s results indicate that, after 9 sessions of AAC Camp, there was no change in the students receiving language instruction or the parents participating in sessions. The only change they saw was growth in therapy skills of the student clinicians who engaged in the interventions. Meredith says this may indicate that we need to be looking at a longer period than 4 weeks for making progress with AAC users. It may also suggest that we can make greater progress with graduate clinicians by giving them more hands-on experiences.

Before the interview, Chris and Rachel discuss Chris’s recent experience as a substitute teacher (due to staffing shortages in his district) in a co-taught general & special education class. Chris talks about some of the things he learned in that role, including the need for more flexible seating options and the general slow speed that public education can move - even when we know something is a better choice for the students.  Chris also shares about how the students were all required to write in a composition book, and he wonders if there would be a way to honor other modalities for writing in a journal (e.g. chromebook, speech to text, etc). 

Key ideas this week:

🔑 When we are thinking about family-centered therapy, we should think about giving the families more hands-on training. In this study, the families didn’t get hands on opportunities, and they made little progress. 

🔑 We have a responsibility to provide models and scaffolding for AAC users for a really long time. Some AAC stakeholders may approach modeling saying “A few weeks of modeling s is enough to see if they can use the device,” but in this case, nothing changed in 4 weeks.

🔑 Caregiver perceptions relate to both the child and the caregiver themselves - after training, the communication partner reports they feel more confident with using the device. When caregivers feel more confident, that will pave the way for better downstream outcomes for AAC users.