QuestionIt Application for iPad

Introducing QuestionIt

QuestionIt is an application that is designed to teach students how to answer WH-questions. This application was primarily designed to use with children diagnosed with autism, but it is a great application to use with students who have language disorders.

This is the main screen. You can see that the app is separated into four activities: sort, sentence, advanced sentence, and paragraph. Sort has three levels, sentence has three levels, and both advanced sentence and paragraph have two levels.

Sort:

Sort asks students to sort words into the correct WH category. There are three levels to sort: level 1, level 2, and level 3. See the pictures below.

Sort Level One

Sort Level Two

Sort Level Three

As you can see, the levels are color-coded. The color-coding prompts fade as the levels get harder. After a number of correct answers, the fireworks reinforcer is used.

For the sorting activity, the student takes their finger and moves the picture on the bottom to the correct picture on the top by placing the bottom picture in the outlined rectangle.

Sentence:

Sentence presents sentences and asks WH-questions in a random order. Sentence has three levels of play: full, partial, and no color cueing. The same sentence structure is maintained for sentence as it is for sort.

Sentence Level One

Sentence Level Two

Sentence Level Three

Advanced Sentence:

The unique part of advanced sentence is the variations of the word orders. Sentence and sort follow the same format, but advanced sentence is varied. This activity offers only partial color cueing and no color cueing.

Advanced Sentence Level One

Advanced Sentence Level Two

Paragraph:

Paragraph presents sentences related in a paragraph form. Questions are asked in a random order to prevent memorization. This activity has two levels with fading color cues - partial color cues and no color cues. 

Paragraph Level One

Paragraph Level Two

Pros:

• I love the voice that accompanies the application. The voice reads all of the sentences and describes what each WH category means. For example: "Who: a person answers a "who" question"; "Where: a place answers a "where" question".
• This application uses errorless learning. The student will have to keep tapping pictures and/or matching until he or she gets it right. The application does not say "that is wrong" or "no", but instead moves the picture back to the bottom (for sorting) or does not respond (for sentence, advanced sentence, and paragraph) if the answer is not correct.
• The fading color cues are fantastic. I like how the beginning levels have a lot of color cues and the advanced levels have no color cues.
• This application has data collection and allows therapists to enter multiple student accounts. The application keeps track of the data and then the therapist can email a report of the student's performance to teachers, parents, etc.

Example of the student data page

You can email reports! As long as your email is set up on your iPad, you can just insert the contact and press send!

Area of Improvement:

• I would like to see better reinforcement after a correct answer. It would be nice if the reinforcement is more exciting and fades as the levels advance. In the beginning levels, the reinforcement should be after every 2-3 correct answers. As the levels increase in difficulty, the reinforcement can fade to 6-8 correct answers. As you can see by the picture below, the fireworks are kind of dull and uninspiring. It would be nice to have something more exciting.

Example of fireworks reinforcement

• It would be nice if there was a way to choose which WH-question to work on instead of being presented with all four choices. I've worked with students who are just starting out learning WH-questions, and I often focused on "who" and "what" before working on "when" and "where". I suppose you could adapt it and turn off the sound, cover the choices, and then ask the student the WH-question you are targeting, but then you have to keep your own data and you might as well use an app that targets the WH-questions separately anyway.

QuestionIt is available in the iTunes store. It is only available for iPad. The price right now is $24.99 which is a little pricey, so make sure you have students you could use the application with before purchasing!

Has anyone else used this application? What do you think? Do you plan on buying this application?