The use of augmented reality-enhanced reading books for vocabulary acquisition with students who are diagnosed with special needs

During this collective case study, I explored the use of augmented reality books on an iPad 2 with students diagnosed with disabilities. Students in this study attended a high school life skills class in a rural school district during the fall 2013 semester. Four students participated in this study, two males and two females. Specifically, the purposes of this study were to (a) describe students' processing of the augmented reality enhanced books by analyzing their spontaneous and prompted verbalizations; (b) identify students' perceived vocabulary word knowledge through a survey that is completed before and after the augmented reality reading activity; (c) examine students' vocabulary word knowledge as mean scores of criterion-referenced worksheets that were completed before and after the augmented reality activity and by their responses to prompted questions within the AR book. This study was guided by the following central research question: How does the use of an augmented reality book that is enhanced with layers of technological, instructional, and conceptual scaffolds, influence vocabulary knowledge and verbal responses of students who are diagnosed with special needs?;The iPad2, reading textbook, Aurasma, Muvizu, Audacity, and Glogster.edu were used to create the AR books. This study lasted for four consecutive weeks, and collected approximately 24 hours of data, which consisted of student observations, transcripts, video data, perceived knowledge surveys, and criterion referenced worksheets. Data were analyzed using an adapted coding scheme from Zimmerman and colleagues (2013), a perceived knowledge survey, and by assessing vocabulary depth knowledge through a matching worksheet, and using an adapted coding scheme by Christ, Wang, and Chiu (2011).;Findings indicated that students participated in the perceptual talk category most often followed by conceptual, device use, unable to answer, affective, questioning, connecting, and learner awareness. Another finding was that students' perceptions of vocabulary knowledge did not always match what was reflected in the transcripts, however, students' perceptions did move in a positive direction. A third finding was students either maintained their knowledge of vocabulary words, or increased their scores from before the activity to after the activity on the worksheet. In addition, students created novel sentences using the target vocabulary words more than half of the time. Some implications for future research include varying the prompts to elicit a broader and deeper range of processing types. In addition, given this sample, it is unclear as to the effectiveness of asking students their perceptions of what vocabulary they do and do not know prior to reading. Lastly, providing students with a more direct prompt asking for a novel sentence might elicit a unique expressive response that could be categorized as a higher-level sentence.