ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique



Article Critique

Introduction

Life is beautiful! It is the privilege and right of an individual to enjoy the each pleasure of life. Unfortunately, life is not fair with everyone. There are people who suffer from disabilities, and they remain unable to access some basic needs such as education. Latest development and advancement in technology has invented devices and tools to provide aid to such people to assist them in obtaining education. The article that is selected for the critical analysis is also dealt with the same topic. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze and summarize the article.

The Main Purpose of the Article

The main purpose of the study is evaluating the effectiveness of a college course on adaptation of assisting technologies. The aim of this study is to identify variegated factors that influence disabled students to either adopt or reject the usage of assistive technology for the personal computer. Another important task for which this study conducted is to know the percentage of disabled students who continue the usage of assistive technology to use computer. It determines the usage after one year of participating in the training program regarding the usage of that assistive device. The third and last objective of this study is to find out how does the MPT model correlate with the information that is gathered from interviews of the disabled students and Q sorts. This information helped to know the factors that make a student adopt or reject assistive technology to access the computer during a course (Glenn, Drew and Pamela, 2002).

Method Used in the Article The method that the researchers selected to perform this study is interview. Three interviews were conducted from 14 disabled students. In the third interview, the instrument of Q-Sort was used. The instrument of Q-Sort asks the participant to quantify or rank the subjective information provided to the participants (McKeown, 2002). This subjective information includes attitude, opinion and beliefs. For this study, the researches first devised the table of all possible responses with the help of literature review information gathered from the interview and with the help of consultants. Total 97 items were selected with these different methods and then students' responses were gauged against every item.

Reasons of Choosing the Method

The first and foremost reason to choose this method is that best for fulfilment of the objective. For example to know the MPT model correlation, it is essential that the information must be quantifiable. Moreover, it should be easy to use for, the participants as the participants were already disabled. To know about the possible items to be included in the final Q-Sort list, it was important to conduct the interview. This information cannot be gathered through any other method (Glenn, Drew and Pamela, 2002).

Tradeoffs of Using the Selected Method

There are various advantages that researchers can get by selecting some other methods to conduct the study. The researchers of this study could have used observation study instead of interview. The important flaw that is important to consider while ...