The development and validation of an interactive hypermedia program for teaching a self-advocacy strategy to students with disabilities

Educators agree that students with disabilities need to acquire self-advocacy skills. Despite the existence of validated methods to teach these skills, evidence suggests that they are seldom explicitly taught. Time and opportunities to teach these skills in both the general and special education setting are minimal. One possible solution is to use instructional technology. The purpose of this project was to develop and validate an Interactive Hypermedia Program (IHP) to teach a self-advocacy strategy to secondarylevel students with disabilities. The strategy for which the IHP was developed and tested is the Self-Advocacy Strategy (Van Reusen, Bos, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1994). The instruction for the strategy was originally validated by Van Reusen, Deshler, and Schumaker (1989). With input from student, teacher, design, and technical consultants, the IHP was created. Students who had learning disabilities, behavior disorders, and other health impairments learned the strategy via the IHP or through live instruction. A multiple-baseline design was used to show the effects of the instruction. In addition, a no-treatment comparison group was included for comparative purposes. At the conclusion of instruction, each student ran his or her own IEP conference. Results showed that the IHP was as effective in teaching students with learning disabilities to use the strategy as live instruction. Further research is warranted to determine if this medium is effective in teaching students other types of strategies.