Working memory is compromised by the need to use AAC as it is a much slower process than speech or free writing. It is therefore essential that students who rely on AAC are given ways of working that mitigate against this as much as possible.

Many schools provide support to AAC reliant students by adding lists of words to their communication pages. Whilst this may be helpful when the student wishes to talk about what they are learning, it is far from adequate in supporting learning outcomes. For this to be possible students need access to the source information that they are learning from, activities that give them practice with the source information and a means to record answers to questions in the same way as their non-disabled peers. We call these three phases of learning input, elaboration, and output. Access to resources in these three phases should be provided in a manner that ensure that the student experiences no disadvantage as compared to the access that their non-disabled peers are entitled to. For this to be possible resources need providing so that the student is required to exert the least possible physical effort in the timeliest manner achievement with maximum independence. This is to ensure that a student’s working memory is not compromised by difficulty with access to learning.

More about the three phases of learning:

The examples in the following section are taken from CandLE’s advanced accredited courses which would be equivalent to the higher levels of a formal curriculum or a mix of key stages 2 and 3.

The input phase:

This is the phase where the teaching is provided to the student either through direct teaching instruction or through their own research of a topic. Examples of ways in which students gather information include:

• Teacher presentations to one or more students using PowerPoint or other presentation software.

• Video presentations.

• Internet Research.

• Textbooks

• Handouts

Any information that a non-disabled student can independently access must also be available for the student who uses AAC to access the same materials on their AAC devices.

Here are some examples of independent access to information:

In this example the student is able to refer to the information from the textbook to answer a multiple-choice question on the same page.

In the above example the student is sorting foods into food groups using word lists to create a labelling activity.

The output phase:

This is the learning phase where the student demonstrates their understanding by answering questions either orally (using their AAC communication pages), by giving short answers to assessment questions (which may be multiple-choice, short written answers or answers using their communication vocabulary). They might also be writing larger pieces of text such as essays or producing a final piece of work, such as a poster, that demonstrates their understanding.

This is the only phase at which a list of words added to communication pages may be partially useful but still not adequate for all the potential output tasks such as building posters, answering multiple-choice question, or writing essays.