3.1  INCREASE COGNITIVE LOAD – MORE COMPLEX ACTIVITIES

for participation, interaction and learning! 

This is the area where many school teams place enormous effort and attention.  And rightly so – since these are the ongoing areas throughout our lives that we need to see continual learning, improvement and participation. 

However, student’s problems with performance and achievement is where the most frustration occurs since so many students with physical disabilities have problems with the most basic skill of consistent physical switch control.

Once the student is at the stage where team members can:

1. set the student up with the switch which can be accurately physically accessed, 
2. move away (with or without interpersonal interaction) and 
3. see the student independently and willingly activate the switch for highly motivating activities,
   
   the student is at a good stage to start participating more successfully in academic, learning and communication tasks.

If the student can clearly achieve with physically activating a switch with a highly motivating activity, then performance in regular educational and communication tasks can be more clearly assessed in terms of intent and accuracy of activation depending on the requirements of the activity.  

Once physical independence in control is achieved, the third stage focuses on accuracy of activation for choice making, appropriate communication, correct selections during learning activities.

There are literally hundreds of communication, academic and learning activities that can be accessed through switches.  

A summary if these include:

• Communication activities:  make requests,  interpersonal communication, answering questions,  make selections, make comments, etc.

• Interacting with computer applications, games, toys.

• Reading online and computer books.

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