The 2022 Doctoral Student AAC Research Think Tank will be held at Penn State University from Tuesday May 10, to Thursday May 12, 2022. Sessions will begin at 9 am on May 10 (registration at 8:30 am) and end at 4 pm on May 12.
The Agenda for 2022 is based on the identified interests of participants, and will include numerous opportunities for student and faculty presentations, as well as follow-up discussions.
In the interests of public health and safety, we will ask attendees to wear masks. Presenters can remove their mask, if they choose, while presenting from the front of the room (at a social distance from the attendees).
May 9 (5:30 pm) – “Welcome to State College” (optional)
If you have are in State College by 5:30 on Monday, May 9, and would like to see a little of Penn State and State College, please join the PSU doctoral students on the benches outside of CEDAR building at 5:30 pm (please see map, benches are marked with a #4). From there, PSU doctoral students and any interested ThinkTank participants will walk through campus to a downtown restaurant for dinner. This is not a “formal” ThinkTank event, it is just meant to be an “optional” social event for those of you who are in State College and would like to join some other people for dinner.
May 10
| 8:30 | Registration, coffee, bagels | 121 Chambers |
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Welcome, Introductions, Agenda, and Goals | 119 Chambers |
| • 10:15 – 11:00 | Dawn Sowers: Investigation into the approaches SLPs use when determining access solutions for children with motor impairments who use AAC | 118 Chambers |
| • 10:15 – 11:00 | Lauramarie Pope: The added effect of AAC within a naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention | 119 Chambers |
| • 11:15 – 12:00 | Blade Frisch: Community engagement and AAC | 118 Chambers |
| • 11:15 – 12:00 | Tiffany Chavers: Effectiveness of peer-mediated AAC intervention on social communicative behaviors in children with severe ASD | 119 Chambers |
| 12 – 12:45 | Lunch at Panera’s | Kern Building |
| 1:00 – 2:00 | David Chapple, Dr. David McNaughton, & Dr. Tracy Rackensperger: Integrated Knowledge Translation in AAC research: Lessons learned from 20+ years of collaboration | 119 Chambers |
| • 2:15 – 3:00 | Mimi LaValley: AAC interventions in acute and critical care settings with mechanically ventilated and tracheostomy patients | 118 Chambers |
| • 2:15 – 3:00 | Landria Seals Green: Decisions decisions: A systematic review of factors important for language programming in AAC users with autism | 119 Chambers |
| • 3:15 – 4:00 | Jo Anne Niemkiewicz: Evidence for restorative effects from compensatory techniques (e.g., drawing, gestures) in people with aphasia | 118 Chambers |
| • 3:15 – 4:00 | Rachel Chen: Surfacing the embodied interactions of non-/minimally-speaking Autistic children | 119 Chambers |
| • 4:15-5:15 | Dr. Janice Light: Building an important line of research to make a positive difference | 119 Chambers |
| 6:00 | Dinner at Hintz Alumni Center |
May 11
| • 8:15 – 8:45 | Coffee, bagels | 121 Chambers |
| • 8:15 – 8:45 | RERC on AAC software demo: mTraining: Supports for partner training | 118 Chambers |
| • 8:15 – 8:45 | RERC on AAC software demo: T2L: Supports for literacy instruction | 119 Chambers |
| • 9:00 – 9:45 | Alice Williams: ALL In: Increasing literacy in students with extensive support needs who use augmentative and alternative communication | 118 Chambers |
| • 9:00 – 9:45 | Rachel Sinclair: Family-Centered Practices for children with complex communication needs in school: The experiences and beliefs of culturally and linguistically diverse parents. | 119 Chambers |
| • 10:00 – 10:45 | Kasie Galley: BRIDGE: Culturally responsive practice in AAC | 118 Chambers |
| • 10:00 – 10:45 | Sara Collins: Measuring teacher communication during shared reading with children who use augmentative and alternative communication | 119 Chambers |
| • 11:00 – 11:45 | Savanna Brittle-Bank Douglas: Understanding the AAC service delivery experiences of SLPs in Sub-Saharan Africa | 118 Chambers |
| • 11:00 – 11:45 | Oliva Hecker: Using asynchronous training to address shared reading strategies with parents of children who use AAC: A single case experimental design | 119 Chambers |
| 12-1:00 | Lunch at Panera’s | Kern Building |
| 1:15-2:15 | Dr. Jessica Gormley, Dr. Christine Holyfield: Reflections from early-career AAC researchers | 119 Chambers |
| • 2:30 – 3:15 | Tara McCarty: Diving into intervention research for students with cortical/cerebral visual impairment (CVI) and complex communication needs (CCN) | 118 Chambers |
| • 2:30 – 3:15 | Sasha Kurlenkova: Interactional resources used to make a disjunctive topic shift in one case of eyetracker-assisted communication | 119 Chambers |
| • 3:30 – 4:15 | Susan Koerner: The use of tiered virtual skills based coaching as a professional development model for rural SLPs | 118 Chambers |
| • 3:30 – 4:15 | Natalie Pak: Systematic review and meta-analysis of high-tech and other AAC modes | 119 Chambers |
| 6:00 | Dinner at Hintz Alumni Center |
May 12
| 8:15 | • Coffee, bagels | 121 Chambers |
| 8:15 – 8:45 | • RERC on AAC Software demo: Access Assistant (supports for access assessment) | 118 Chambers |
| 8:15 – 8:45 | • RERC on AAC Software demo: Video VSD (video modeling support for participation and communication) | 119 Chambers |
| 9:00 – 10:00 | Dr. Susan Fager, Dr. Heidi Koester, & Erik Jakobs Establishing and maintaining collaborations with other researchers and community partners | 119 Chambers |
| • 10:15 – 11:00 | Alaina Grissom: Lexical diversity and AAC | 118 Chambers |
| • 10:15 – 11:00 | Meredith Suhr: A preliminary analysis of communicative functions used by autistic AAC users in school | 119 Chambers |
| • 11:15 – 12 | TianTian Sun: Response time of children with complex communication needs following a communication opportunity | 118 Chambers |
| • 11:15 – 12 | Grace Clark: Orthographic support for word learning in minimally verbal autistic children & adolescents | 119 Chambers |
| 12-1:00 | Lunch at Panera’s | Kern Building |
| • 1:00 – 2:00 | Lauramarie Pope, Janice Light, Amber Franklin: Racial disparities in AAC services: Developing an action plan. | 119 Chambers |
| • 2:15 – 3:00 | Zhigao Liang: Enhancing participation and communication for university students with ASD using AAC video Visual Scene Displays | 121 Chambers |
| • 2:15- 3:00 | Syrina Merilan: Factors influencing vocabulary size in children with developmental disabilities: The impact of AAC and conversational turn-taking | 118 Chambers |
| • 2:15- 3:00 | Brittney Cooper: Constructing relational concepts: A pedagogical design for students with complex communication needs | 119 Chambers |
| 3:15 – 4:00 | Closing remarks | 119 Chambers |
