Adapting an educational tool to be used by non-severe cognitive disabled students

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073)Proceeding of Towards User Modeling and Adaptive Systems for All (TUMAS-A 2009): Modeling and Evaluation of Accessible Intelligent Learning Systems, In conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2009) Brighton, United Kingdom, July 6, 2009.Since 2007, we have been using the Will Tools, a set of Blended Learning applications able to automatically assess students’ free-text answers and provide immediate personalized feedback to each student. In this paper, our hypothesis is that these tools can be easily adapted to be used by students with some type of non-severe cognitive impairment. In order to test this hypothesis, we present a procedure to transform the Will Tools into the Will Tools ALADE (the version of the Will Tools designed for students with cognitive disabilities). Moreover, an experiment in which 13 students, some of them with Down syndrome and others type of non-severe mental disabilities, have successfully used the Will Tools ALADE is describedThis work has been sponsored by Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, project TIN2007-64718