Digital competence of students with disabilities using a mobile device in a post-secondary transition program for potential employment
Files
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
With the continued development of technology, teaching with a mobile device has been applied to special education. The ability to use technology, which is digital competence, is an essential skill preparing students with intellectual disabilities (ID) not only for academic achievement but also for future careers. The purpose of this research was to assess the impact of students’ digital competence in using mobile devices in the CrossingPoints program, a post-secondary transition program, specifically when seeking employment. This study used the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens called DigComp 2.1 (Carretero, Vuorikari, & Punie, 2017) to assess students’ digital competence for employment. The framework includes five digital competence areas: (a) information and data literacy, (b) communication and collaboration, (c) digital content creation, (d) safety, and (e) problem solving. This current research focused only on the first competence, information and data literacy (IDL), because of its importance for students with disability and limited research time. Participants took the Technology Workshop class for 9 weeks with an iPad and took a test at the end of each class. For this research, a multiple baseline across subjects, which is a type of single case study (Gast et al., 2014), was used to determine the efficacy of the technology class intervention for improving digital competence for students with ID. The visual analysis was used to evaluate level, trend, and stability of the IDL skills within baseline and intervention phases. To analyze the effect-size of the digital competence of each phase, the Improvement Rate Difference (IRD) was used in this research. All participants increased filtering skills of IDL competence based on the results of visual analysis of graphed data. Also, they showed significant improvements on the percentage of IDL scores to the intervention based on the results of and the IRD analysis. In conclusion, a class using a mobile device can improve students’ IDL competence for employment and learning motivation.