Tablet-Based Activity Schedule in Mainstream Environment for Children with Autism and Children with ID
Charles Fage, Léonard Pommereau, Charles Consel, Emilie Balland, Hélène Sauzéon · 2016 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) · doi:10.1145/2854156
Summary
This paper presents Classroom Schedule+ (CS+), a tablet-based activity schedule application designed to support the inclusion of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in mainstream school environments. Developed through participatory design with mainstream teachers, special education teachers, and school aides, CS+ addresses two activity domains: classroom routines (nonverbal tasks like taking out materials, sitting properly, putting things away) and verbal communication routines (greeting classmates, asking to borrow items, raising hand to speak). The application displays visual step-by-step sequences using idiosyncratic multimedia content — photographs of the actual child, their classroom, and their specific objects — rather than generic clip art, grounding the instructions in the child's real environment. Each routine is decomposed into a sequence of pictorial steps with emotion-tagging (the child selects how they feel before and after each activity) and level activations (routines progress through levels of decreasing support as the child masters them). Two overlapping studies were conducted in real mainstream secondary school settings in France over three months. Study 1 compared five children with ASD equipped with CS+ against five non-equipped children with ASD. Study 2 used a cross-syndrome design comparing the five equipped ASD children with five children with intellectual disability (ID) who also used CS+, enabling insights into whether design principles targeting ASD generalize to other neurodevelopmental conditions.
Key findings
In Study 1, children with ASD equipped with CS+ showed significantly greater improvement in classroom routine performance compared to non-equipped peers (large effect size eta-squared = 0.802 for time, 0.887 for activity domain). Crucially, tablet use became self-initiated by almost all ASD participants within two months, demonstrating genuine autonomous adoption. After three months, equipped children performed better on both classroom routines and verbal communication activities. Study 2 revealed important differences between ASD and ID populations: while both groups improved on classroom routines, children with ID showed significantly less improvement on verbal communication routines and never achieved autonomous use of the application — they still required school aide prompting at the end of the intervention. Log data showed children with ID dramatically decreased their CS+ usage over time, suggesting discouragement from the persistent cognitive cost of operating the tool. The cross-syndrome comparison revealed that design principles effective for ASD do not automatically transfer to ID: children with ID may need multimodal prompting (auditory, haptic) rather than purely visual prompts, given their poorer reading skills and different cognitive flexibility profiles. Single-case analysis showed high interindividual variability within both ASD and ID groups, with children showing the highest improvements in ASD having relatively low social responsiveness scores, while children with ID benefiting most had relatively low IQ scores.
Relevance
This research makes several important contributions to accessibility practice. First, it demonstrates that tablet-based assistive technology can meaningfully support mainstream inclusion of children with ASD — some participants previously considered unable to be in mainstream classrooms showed "spectacular improvements" leading to increased classroom time. Second, the cross-syndrome design provides a critical methodological lesson: assistive technologies designed for one disability population should not be assumed effective for another without explicit evaluation, even when the populations share educational settings. Third, the participatory design process with school staff yielded practical insights about deploying technology in schools — teachers wanted short interventions, schools required all children in special education to be included, and some educators had negative beliefs about tablets isolating children socially. For practitioners developing educational assistive technology, the study underscores the importance of idiosyncratic content (real photographs of the child's environment), graduated support levels, and considering that autonomous use — not just effectiveness — is a critical success metric.
Tags: autism spectrum disorder · intellectual disability · mainstream inclusion · activity schedule · tablet · participatory design · education · special education · children