Mobile Training for Peers to Support Students With Multiple Disabilities and Cortical Visual Impairment in Communicating Choices.

Purpose: The current study investigated the impact of a short mobile training implemented in peer pairs to teach the Communicating Choices-CVI (Peers) strategy to support interactions with students with multiple disabilities.

Method: A pretest-posttest control group design was used to evaluate the effects of the training created on the INSTRUCT app, which used a checklist of steps with video models to teach elementary-age peers a strategy to structure opportunities for students with multiple disabilities to communicate choices. Peers were randomly assigned to the experimental group (n = 10) or control group (n = 10) and then video-recorded while interacting with students with multiple disabilities during one pretest and one posttest interaction in their typical educational settings. Peers in the experimental group completed the training between the pretest and posttest; peers in the control group did not.

Results: The training was found to be both efficient and effective with limited adult involvement required. Following the training, which took approximately 23 min, peers in the experimental group demonstrated statistically significant gains in accuracy of strategy substep implementation, which led to increased successful communication by the students with multiple disabilities.

Conclusions: This is the first communication partner training study to investigate the impact of the INSTRUCT app and peer pairs to teach a strategy for structuring opportunities to communicate choices to students with multiple disabilities including cortical visual impairment (CVI). By investigating the outcomes of the training in a real-world context (i.e., school environment), the results offer information that is directly transferrable and applicable to clinicians who may be interested in implementation of similar procedures.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29996182.