SCRIPT OF Accessibility in Higher Education PRESENTATION BY ELLEN PERLOW (copyright 2008) Texas Woman's University Student Research and Creative Arts Symposium - April 23, 2008 Alternative formats upon request. ================================ Thank you very much Dr. Hamner. Welcome y'all! To accommodate your access needs due to her foreign New York accent, Ellen thought it best that I give her presentation. Please extend a warm welcome to our interpreter Jennifer Borgman and to my distinguished faculty sponsors Dr. Michael Wiebe and Dr. Mark Hamner. Your handouts include the PowerPoint slides, a supplement for definition of terms, cited legislation and references, and a written transcript of my oral remarks, available in Braille, text-only electronic formats and additional formats upon request. Please turn to Slide 2: the outline for this presentation. Definition of terms discussion of the research purpose questions and hypotheses will be followed by the literature review, research methodology results conclusions and directions for further research and Acknowledgments, with time for audience questions. Please turn to Slide 3: selected definitions of terms that will be used throughout the presentation. More detailed definitions are located in the supplement. Please turn to Slide 4. The purpose of Ellen's research is to demonstrate that in the context of higher education: 1. Students with access needs including veterans are a diversity population of critical interest. 2. As for all students, faculty attitudes are critical to academic and career success of students with access needs. 3. Faculty attitudes are key to establishing a campus culture of accessibility; and 4. Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning are best practices for institutional effectiveness. Please turn to Slides 5 and 6 that list the two major quantitative research questions and the derived general hypotheses. The research questions and hypotheses examine whether postsecondary faculty academic discipline and certain explanatory variables are related to faculty attitudes toward access issues and students with access needs. Please turn to Slide 7: a photograph of U.S. Army and Air Force service members caring for wounded troops. Advances in science medicine and technology have increased survival rates on wars' battlefields despite acquisition of often complex and lifelong access needs. A moment for reflection please. Please turn to Slide 8. Literature Review. In the United States, accessibility in the form of civil rights for people with access needs and inclusion in public education through the secondary level have been the law for over 30 years. Since 2004, universal design for learning [UDL] and provision of accessible universally designed instructional materials in pre-K-12 public education, are the law. Please turn to Slide 9, a graphic that shows how universal design and universal design for learning combined with assistive technology work together to create accessibility. Please turn to Slide 10: The graph demonstrates the increase in prevalence of primary and secondary students with legally-defined access needs during the past 30 years, both nationally and in Texas. Please turn to Slide 11. Statistics demonstrate the increase from 2001 to 2005 in the percentage of students with access needs served under the I D E A law, particularly in certain eligibility groups such as autism spectrum and other health issues including AD/HD. These students' high school graduation rates and thus projected applications to and enrollments in higher education also are on the rise; Growth in the need for special education teachers also is forecast. Please turn to Slide 12. Higher education has become a beneficiary of accessibility practice in K-12 schools as well as global awareness of universal access concerns. Like the pre-K-12 sector, higher education is witnessing an increase in the proportion of students with access needs as well as students who are older adults. Every day, many more of us are these older adults. Ellen also cites herself as a most authoritative source that aging does indeed change and increase access needs. Please turn to Slide 13. Indeed accessibility is a boundary-free universal diversity issue. We all are people with access needs. And so, BY DEFINITION, we all need to care about accessibility. Please turn to Slide 14. Why does higher education in particular have a need to care about accessibility? To quote the U.S. Department of Education: "In September 2006, [in her Final Report on the Future of Higher Education], [Department] Secretary Spellings announced her action plan to make higher education in the U.S. more accessible, affordable, and accountable" unquote. This Spellings Commission report appears to signal accessibility as a key ingredient for attaining institutional effectiveness and fiscal accountability. Dear TWU Faculty: Does not the Spellings report sound familiar? See the TWU Website. Indeed, pre-K-12 legislation, I D E A and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), now appear to have arrived in U.S. higher education. Please turn to Slide 15. Transitioning to the methodology of the research studies. The pair of TWU Institutional Review Board [IRB] approved studies has included required signed informed consent by purposive samples of faculty participants and by design provision of accessible formats and venues. 30 health educators participated in the first study. The second ongoing study so far has recruited 14 library and information science, or for short, L I S faculty. Please turn to Slide 16. Slide 16 describes the studies' IRB-approved participant recruitment procedure. Please turn to Slide 17. A major reason why Health Education and Education/L I S faculties were chosen as primary populations of interest is the importance of accessibility in these disciplines. Please turn to Slide 18: the survey instruments. Responses to the surveys’ identical 15 randomly ordered question items are on an ordinal scale from least positive (1) to most positive (5). “I Don’t Know” (3) is a valid response. The survey design, demographic-free positively-worded and easy to complete, attempts to accommodate the access needs of very busy faculty and to address common faculty access-related concerns. The surveys also have offered opportunity for optional comments that are being analyzed qualitatively. Please turn to Slide 19: Data Analysis. The 15 survey items originally were classified into five categories or group variables: Experience/Knowledge, Negative Experience, Comfort, Confidence, and Interest. Reliability analysis for internal consistency of the classification scheme was conducted via review by experts, as well as statistically via the Cronbach’s Alpha procedure. Please turn to Slide 20. The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability analysis demonstrates fairly high reliability for Experience/Knowledge, Comfort and Interest groups. Confidence group reliability is in the moderate range, possibly explained by the three confidence-related questions concerning not only student academic success, but also future successful entry into the profession. Negative Experience shows low reliability and its items 8 and 9 are integrated into the Comfort group, creating the Comfort+ variable. Please turn to Slide 21. As a result of reliability analysis, group variables of interest are reduced from five to four categories. Please turn to Slide 22. A graphic depicts a conceptual model for analyzing responses to the 15 survey items as coded into the adjusted four group variables, with Negative Experience a subset of Comfort. Please turn to Slide 23. Statistical analysis is conducted utilizing SAS software. Recalling the first research question and hypothesis, responses are compared by academic discipline, first with frequency statistics. Because parametric assumptions are not met due to non-random sampling procedure and small sample sizes, also to address the second research question, nonparametric tests for ordinal data are conducted. The data then are represented by plots. Please turn to Slide 24: Results. To date, data from Health Education and L I S disciplines have been collected and analyzed. Participant recruitment of Education and L I S faculty is continuing. Please see the IRB-approved invitation to participate in this research among your handouts. Please turn to Slide 25 depicting the frequency distribution of “I Don’t Know” responses across survey items. High "I Don't Know" response rates are reported for the "Comfort in Online classes" and "Confidence" questions. Please turn to Slide 26: five-point summary data. A higher level of self-reported experience and knowledge about access issues appears for L I S faculty. Please turn to Slide 27: Results of the Wilcoxon Rank Order Sum test, the nonparametric equivalent of the t-test for two small samples of ordinal data. Wilcoxon tests the null hypothesis that the two samples come from the same population. Matching results presented on Slide 26, the only category for which the null hypothesis may be rejected at the alpha .05 level is the Experience/Knowledge group variable. Please turn to Slides 28 and 29. Recalling the second research question, selected results of Spearman correlation analysis are presented for the four group variables. Please turn to Slide 30. A SAS-generated overlay scatterplot displays one of the results of the prior Spearman Correlation 4-group analysis: a moderate positive correlation between Comfort and Interest, significant at the alpha = .10 level for the L I S sample, evident in the more tightly grouped L I S data points. Please turn to Slides 31 and 32: Presented are Spearman correlation results when Comfort and Negative Experience are treated as separate group variables. For the Health Education sample, Negative Experience appears to be inversely correlated with Experience/Knowledge to a significant degree at the alpha equals .05 level. Please turn to Slide 33. A SAS-generated overlay scatterplot displaying the previously discussed inverse correlation suggests that regarding access issues, greater experience/knowledge reduces negative experiences. Please turn to Slide 34. A pair of SAS-generated three-dimensional scatterplots depicts Experience/Comfort/Confidence group data by discipline. Generally, both plots show that more experience/knowledge and comfort results in more confidence. Please turn to Slide 35. Preliminary Conclusions. Based on analysis to date, as affected by sample sizes, the good news is that increased knowledge appears to reduce negative attitudes. Faculty respondents are interested in positive interaction with students with access needs, and learning more about accessibility universal design and assistive technology. However, a cause for concern and advocacy is many faculty members' expressed lack of full confidence in students' academic and future career success. Please turn to Slide 36. Directions for future research and advocacy include continued participant recruitment of especially Education faculty for the current study, and the studies’ replication in more disciplines. Because the future begins right now, may I again advocate strongly for higher education's adoption of universal design for learning, both in theory and in practice. Please turn to Slide 37. Thank you very much for attending this presentation. Ellen Perlow's contact information is eperlow@hotmail.com Please turn to Slide 38. Oh my. I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Kurzweil 3000, developed by my namesake, Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor over 30 years ago of the original text to speech Kurzweil Machine, (see kurzweiledu.com). I am universally designed assistive technology that makes everyone’s life easier. As you have noticed, I simultaneously voice and I visually read aloud text, guiding the reading by highlighting words phrases and sentences. I can be personalized in many ways with different voices pitch volume reading speed and various highlighter color combinations. Text font size and style, and pronunciation of words are adjustable. I navigate by keystroke or mouse and import/export documents. I have word prediction spell-check dictionary and thesaurus. My multimodality supports diverse learning styles and promotes everyone’s literacy skills. Both professors and students find me very helpful, especially upon losing their voice or when needing to rehearse presentations as not to speak past their allotted time. With that subtle reminder, before opening the floor to questions: Please turn to Slide 39. Finally, Acknowledgments. Thank you to our interpreter Jennifer Borgman. Deepest gratitude is extended to three distinguished "Simply the Best" Texas Woman's University Professors who have made this research both possible and accessible. Please recognize, Dr. William Cissell - Cornaro Professor and Faculty Advisor, Department of Health Studies (retired), Dr. Michael Wiebe - Professor and Faculty Advisor, Department of Teacher Education/Special Education and Dr. Mark Hamner - Statistics Professor Extraordinaire, recipient, TWU's prestigious Mary Mason Lyon Faculty Award for 2008. Congratulations Dr. Hamner!