Todd Cunningham

Biography

Dr. Todd Cunningham is working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto.

Research Interest

My research has been focused on academic interventions for student-age child who have learning difficulties: 1. The selection of assistive technology address the identified academic skill deficits; 2. Increase the effectiveness of assistive technology; 3. Development of learning profiles to better assist in the identification of academic interventions. With more than 400 assistive technology products on the market, identifying the right assistive technology to meet the needs of students. For the past years I have developing the Assistive Technology Selection Protocol to guide partners to identify the right technology taking into consideration the student's learning profile, environmental factors and the specific tasks impairing them. , I have also been looking at how to increase the effectiveness of assistive technology. Focused on text-to-speech, I have identified factors that increase its effectiveness. On of these is the integration of pausing within spoken sentences. This finding is being adopted by text-to-speech developers. As a school and clinical psychologist, I use learning profiles to guide the development and implementation of academic interventions for students that have learning difficulties. Through telepsychology I provided a clinical practicum in the SCCP program. The telepsychology program provides teacher consultation to schools in Northern Ontario.