10-04-2017, 08:30 PM
The Note-Taker: An Assistive Technology That Allows Students Who Are
Legally Blind to Take Notes in the Classroom
Abstract
Note-taking is a fundamental learning activity that
should be practiced by every serious secondary or postsecondary
student. Research has shown that the mental
processing that occurs during note-taking helps students
consolidate and retain classroom instruction, even if they
never study their notes afterward. However, students who
are legally blind can have difficulty taking notes in the
classroom. Even with a visual aid (such as s monocular)
for viewing the front of the room, a fast paced class can
make it difficult for a student who is legally blind to keep
up with the lectures especially in more advanced classes.
Some schools have attempted to help such students by
equipping classrooms with audio or video recording
systems, or by paying other students to take notes for
them. However, these approaches do not actively engage
the student in note-taking during the lecture. In this paper
we discuss our research, which is aimed at developing a
portable Tablet-PC-based Note-Taker that can be carried
from classroom to classroom by the student, and does not
require lecturers to adapt their presentations in any way.
1. Introduction
The term legally blind is used to describe a level of
visual impairment that typically makes a person eligible
for government benefits. Legal blindness is defined as: (1)
a central visual acuity of 20/200 or worse in the better eye,
with the best possible correction, or (2) a visual field of 20
degrees diameter or less. According to the American
Foundation for the Blind [1], in 2008 there were about 1.3
million Americans who were legally blind. The National
Center for Policy Research for Women and Families [17]
says the high school attrition rate for students with severe
visual impairment or blindness is 40%, compared to 25%
for fully sighted students. High school graduates with
severe visual impairment are just as likely to take college
courses as fully sighted students, but they are less likely to
graduate from college.
These statistics suggest that, as students with visual
disabilities advance through their secondary and
postsecondary schooling (when they are expected to take a
more active role in their education, such as note-taking
during class) they find it increasingly difficult to keep
pace with their peers. Couple these statistics with the fact
that only about 30% of legally blind working age people
are employed, and we have a powerful argument for
finding more effective methods for providing them with
higher levels of education.
Classroom note-taking helps students concentrate and
understand the central concepts presented during lectures.
It has been shown that active note-taking in class helps
students recall information, even if the notes are never
subsequently reviewed outside of class [2]. It has also
been shown that note-taking helps note-takers perform
better on far-transfer tasks, such as problem solving in
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
(STEM) classes [3]. Note-taking promotes a deeper level
of understanding because an assimilative encoding process
is engaged [4, 5].
The Note-Taker project described here was born out of
necessity, when an undergraduate math and computer
science student who works in our lab (and who is legally
blind) found that the pace of the lectures in his senior-level
math classes had become too fast for him to take adequate
notes. His professors typically filled several boards
multiple times during a 45-minute class, proving lemmas
and theorems that relied on previous lemmas. He found
himself getting lost during the theorem proofs.
He was forced to either stop taking notes (which left
him unable to remember the lemma by the time of the
theorem) or to frantically try to write down everything, in
which case he got virtually nothing out of the lecture. In
either case, he wasn t fully understanding the proofs.
During high school and college he had already tried out
numerous assistive technologies, so he knew that there
wasn t anything available that could fix his problem.
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