Technology with Low Incidence Populations: Promoting Access to Education and Learning.

This report is the product of a symposium which examined the current knowledge base of technology use in special education and identified aspects ready to be transferred into the practical setting. Presentations revolve around students with low-incidence disabilities: severe physical and severe cognitive impairments, and those impairments in combination with severe sensory impairments. Six areas of research are addressed: choice making through environmental control, means of accessing instruction, alternative and augmentative means of communicating, information feedback in instructional design, graphics in instructional design, and speech technology. The research focuses on hardware design, software design, pedagogy embodied in those designs, teaching procedures to effect optimal use, and the outcomes that the designs serve. The report concludes with a discussion of the barriers that seem to limit the transfer of the research into practice and potential solutions to those barriers. Includes almost 150 references. (JDD)