Clicker®

Hannah Kay
St. Piers National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy Kent

As a Speech and Language Therapist, working at the National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy, I am keen to investigate interventions which can support the specific learning and communication difficulties which are presented to me.  Young people with epilepsy often present with specific learning difficulties associated with verbal processing and memory.  I have recommended the use of Clicker as it enables practitioners to support literacy tasks and development with non-readers.  It has provided some of my students with increased opportunity to develop literacy skills using a visual and interactive approach.

"I incorporated the use of colour coding..."I have recently completed my MSc. in Speech and Language Therapy, looking at the effectiveness of using Clicker to improve the language skills (use of clause and sentence structure) in a group of children with epilepsy, learning and communication difficulties.  I incorporated the use of colour coding into my intervention with the aim of teaching the students a visual code which could be used to support the discrimination of different thematic roles.  Students for example were taught to find yellow cells in order to answer ‘who’ questions and red cells to answer ‘what’ questions.  The use of colour coding, together with symbols and auditory feedback (the students were taught to click the right button, which had a picture of an ear attached) enabled even those with poor literacy to create a basic sentence about a picture presented.

Performance seen using Clicker during intervention was not necessarily generalised to outside of the therapy setting, however Clicker was seen to support the compromised child who would otherwise have difficulties formulating sentences, which are semantically or syntactically sound. 

The National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy (NCYPE) is the UK’s major provider of specialist services for children and young people with complex epilepsy. A national charity, The NCYPE works in partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust and the Institute of Child Health. Located in Lingfield, Surrey, The NCYPE'S 200-acre campus includes St Piers School, St Piers Further Education College and a range of epilepsy diagnostic, assessment, rehabilitation and outreach services.

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