We were given a prompt to reflect on which asked us to consider how a student should be tested if their reading ability inhibits a student's ability to understand science and their ability to show what they know. How also might assistance technologies help in these situations?
Depending on the degree to which a person has a difficulty reading, are they simply slow readers, do they have major comprehension problems, are they illiterate, or does their difficulty stem from a developmental disorder or something more physical such as blindness? A simple solution might be found in some of these cases, such as increasing the time which they can take for a test while maintaining fairness to the rest of the class to maintain a time restriction, or perhaps extra care could be made to simplify the wording of a problem.
In physics and chemistry, it is often a necessary skill to translate word problems or real world situations into a model or simplification, meaning that testing should still contain written out problems, either with or without diagrams to test a student's ability to translate and interpret a physical situation into the relationships which are fundamental. In the case of a learning disability which practically prevents a student from understanding written questions, something could be done to prepare audio versions of the questions which are burned to CD and played in a CD player provided in the classroom with headphones. The solution for me would depend highly on the problem, but I would attempt to find the simplest solution without providing an advantage to the student. Help should only be provided such that it puts them on a level playing field with the rest of the students, which might be the hardest part to determine!
Here at VT in the Physics department, we actually have a student who is completely blind and has many assistance technologies helping her including someone who sits the course with her. Though my involvement with her is practically nonexistent, I know that books for her have been made, as well as a specific schedule has been drawn up, lectures have had to be reworked slightly to spell out what the equations look like, and at least a slight involvement of most of the department is necessary. The materials are available and generally funding seems to be available to help out, though finding them might be difficult.
From my own experience with someone who seemed to be not perfectly diagnosed, increased test taking time was the official solution. I found his ability to understand the concepts extremely poor however, and I offered lots of time between tests to answer any questions or make up extra examples to test his comprehension, talking out how he viewed the problems as well as walking through them together so he could understand the connections, assumptions, and ideas that I was attributing to find a solution to a given problem. I wish I had had someone who I could have confided in on the matter, but due to privacy issues I was afraid to do so. The solution to a problem first comes with a correct identification of the problem, and I feel that mine would have been easier knowing more fully what the matter was. At the college level, one hesitates to really give too much help that is not specifically requested, for example, only so much explanation of a homework problem is useful to the student, as they need to develop their own method for attacking problems, but at the grade school level this could be very different, depending mostly on the age level and then the material.
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