Deliberate System-Side Errors as a Potential Pedagogic Strategy for Exploratory Virtual Learning Environments

This paper describes an exploratory study of system-side errors (i.e. expectation- or rule-violations) in a virtual environment (VE), and the subsequent reactions of young children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). Analysis of existing video from 8 participants interacting with the ECHOES VE showed that they frequently detected and reacted to system-side errors, engaging in social and communicative behaviours targeted by ECHOES. Detecting errors requires children to compare the VE's state to their mental model of its behaviour, determining where the two are discrepant. This is equivalent to learners identifying mistakes in their own knowledge and then re-aligning with the system-as-expert. This paper explores the implications of these results, proposing a taxonomy of discrepant event types, and discussing their location with respect to the learner and/or system. In addition to considering these results' significance for this user group and context, it relates the research to existing work that uses erroneous examples. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Learning about neurodiversity at school:A feasibility study of a new classroom programme for mainstream primary schools

Neurodivergent children educated in mainstream classrooms too often face poor outcomes compared to neurotypical peers. These may be caused, or exacerbated, by the negative attitudes and actions of classmates. One way to address these poor outcomes could be to educate all children about neurodiversity and neurodivergence, and how these differences manifest in school. The LEANS programme is a comprehensive, whole-classroom resource for teaching about neurodiversity concepts. In this feasibility study, LEANS was trialled in seven classrooms in Scotland. Measures captured pupil knowledge of neurodiversity, and their attitudes and intended actions in relation to their classmates. Approximately 140 children took part in the programme, of which 62 (about 40%) had parent consent to submit data for analysis. Quantitative analyses were pre-registered. Children who participated scored significantly above chance in their knowledge of neurodiversity at outcome (mean = 5.08 correct answers) and increased their scores on the Attitudes and Actions Questionnaire (mean difference = 1.14, p<.001). Qualitative data revealed good feasibility and low risk of harms. The LEANS programme can successfully teach children terminology and ideas about neurodiversity and neurodivergence, and this also increases positive attitudes and intendedactions. This feasibility study should be followed up with a fully-powered evaluation in a more diverse sample, which also captures long-term impacts of LEANS

Short report: Evaluation of wider community support for a neurodiversity teaching programme designed using participatory methods

Children with diagnoses such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and so on often experience bullying at school. This group can be described as neurodivergent, meaning they think and process information differently from most people. Previous research suggests that increasing people's knowledge can be an effective way to reduce stigma and bullying. Therefore, we decided to create a primary school resource to teach about neurodiversity - the concept that all humans vary in how our brains work. Working with educators, our research team - which included neurodivergent people - developed plans for a teaching programme called Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS). Next, we wanted to know whether these plans, developed by our small neurodiverse team, would be endorsed by the wider community. To find out, we conducted an online feedback survey about our plans for the resource. We analysed feedback from 111 people who participated. Most of them identified as neurodivergent (70%) and reported being familiar with neurodiversity (98%), meaning they could provide an informed opinion on our plans. Over 90% of people expressed support for the planned programme content described in the survey, and 73% of them approved our intended definition of the resource's core concept, neurodiversity. From these results, we concluded that there was a high level of support for the planned LEANS programme content across those from the wider community who completed the survey. Consequently, we continued developing the LEANS programme in line with the initial plans from our neurodiverse team. The completed resource is now available as a free download

Short report: Evaluation of wider community support for a neurodiversity teaching programme designed using participatory methods

Children with neurodevelopmental diagnoses often experience discrimination from their peers at school. This may result from a lack of understanding, and intolerance of differences in their thinking, communication and social interactions. Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS) is a teaching programme designed to educate primary school children about the concept of neurodiversity. The LEANS programme was created by a neurodiverse team, using participatory methods. In the current study, we evaluated whether the wider neurodiverse community endorsed the planned design generated by our participatory approach. Respondents ( n = 111) rated their support for key elements of the planned LEANS content, via an online survey. Participants were majority neurodivergent (70%), 98% of whom reported moderate-to-high familiarity with neurodiversity concepts. Over 90% of respondents expressed support for the planned content presented, and 73% of respondents endorsed the draft neurodiversity definition provided. A small number of respondents provided open-ended comments giving further detail on their views. Overall, the LEANS programme plan received a high level of support from this independent, neurodiversity-aware sample – demonstrating the potential of small-group participatory methods to generate wider community support. The completed resource is now available as a free online download. Lay abstract Children with diagnoses such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and so on often experience bullying at school. This group can be described as neurodivergent, meaning they think and process information differently from most people. Previous research suggests that increasing people’s knowledge can be an effective way to reduce stigma and bullying. Therefore, we decided to create a primary school resource to teach about neurodiversity – the concept that all humans vary in how our brains work. Working with educators, our research team – which included neurodivergent people – developed plans for a teaching programme called Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS). Next, we wanted to know whether these plans, developed by our small neurodiverse team, would be endorsed by the wider community. To find out, we conducted an online feedback survey about our plans for the resource. We analysed feedback from 111 people who participated. Most of them identified as neurodivergent (70%) and reported being familiar with neurodiversity (98%), meaning they could provide an informed opinion on our plans. Over 90% of people expressed support for the planned programme content described in the survey, and 73% of them approved our intended definition of the resource’s core concept, neurodiversity. From these results, we concluded that there was a high level of support for the planned LEANS programme content across those from the wider community who completed the survey. Consequently, we continued developing the LEANS programme in line with the initial plans from our neurodiverse team. The completed resource is now available as a free download

Evaluating the impact of voice activity detection on speech emotion recognition for autistic children

Individuals with autism are known to face challenges with emotion regulation, and express their affective states in a variety of ways. With this in mind, an increasing amount of research on automatic affect recognition from speech and other modalities has recently been presented to assist and provide support, as well as to improve understanding of autistic individuals' behaviours. As well as the emotion expressed from the voice, for autistic children the dynamics of verbal speech can be inconsistent and vary greatly amongst individuals. The current contribution outlines a voice activity detection (VAD) system specifically adapted to autistic children's vocalisations. The presented VAD system is a recurrent neural network (RNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) cells. It is trained on 130 acoustic Low-Level Descriptors (LLDs) extracted from more than 17 h of audio recordings, which were richly annotated by experts in terms of perceived emotion as well as occurrence and type of vocalisations. The data consist of 25 English-speaking autistic children undertaking a structured, partly robot-assisted emotion-training activity and was collected as part of the DE-ENIGMA project. The VAD system is further utilised as a preprocessing step for a continuous speech emotion recognition (SER) task aiming to minimise the effects of potential confounding information, such as noise, silence, or non-child vocalisation. Its impact on the SER performance is compared to the impact of other VAD systems, including a general VAD system trained from the same data set, an out-of-the-box Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) VAD system, as well as the expert annotations. Our experiments show that the child VAD system achieves a lower performance than our general VAD system, trained under identical conditions, as we obtain receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (ROC-AUC) metrics of 0.662 and 0.850, respectively. The SER results show varying performances across valence and arousal depending on the utilised VAD system with a maximum concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.263 and a minimum root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.107. Although the performance of the SER models is generally low, the child VAD system can lead to slightly improved results compared to other VAD systems and in particular the VAD-less baseline, supporting the hypothesised importance of child VAD systems in the discussed context

Blending human and artificial intelligence to support autistic children’s social communication skills

This paper examines the educational efficacy of a learning environment in which children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) engage in social interactions with an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual agent and where a human practitioner acts in support of the interactions. A multi-site intervention study in schools across the UK was conducted with 29 children with ASC and learning difficulties, aged 4-14 years old. For reasons related to data completeness and amount of exposure to the AI environment, data for 15 children was included in the analysis. The analysis revealed a significant increase in the proportion of social responses made by ASC children to human practitioners. The number of initiations made to human practitioners and to the virtual agent by the ASC children also increased numerically over the course of the sessions. However, due to large individual differences within the ASC group, this did not reach significance. Although no evidence of transfer to the real-world post-test was shown, anecdotal evidence of classroom transfer was reported. The work presented in this paper offers an important contribution to the growing body of research in the context of AI technology design and use for autism intervention in real school contexts. Specifically, the work highlights key methodological challenges and opportunities in this area by leveraging interdisciplinary insights in a way that (i) bridges between educational interventions and intelligent technology design practices, (ii) considers the design of technology as well as the design of its use (context and procedures) on par with one another, and (iii) includes design contributions from different stakeholders, including children with and without ASC diagnosis, educational practitioners and researchers

Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS) secondary school consultation study

The Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS) resource is an evidence-based resource pack designed by a neurodiverse team of researchers, for teachers to educate mainstream primary school pupils aged 8-11 about neurodiversity. Anecdotal evidence has highlighted public support for provision of a LEANS resource to teach about neurodiversity in secondary schools. This study aimed to articulate what factors need to be considered when adapting the LEANS resource for use in secondary schools, assessing the fit between LEANS as designed for primary schools and the secondary school context. We conducted semi-structured online focus groups consulting with secondary education professionals to gain feedback on key aspects of the LEANS materials. These included the taught elements of the LEANS curriculum, the usefulness of narrative elements for teaching about neurodiverse experiences, the role of teachers and pupils in engaging with the resource and the format of activities used in the resource. A mix of inductive and deductive thematic analysis was conducted to derive themes from focus group discussions. By consulting with education professionals with experience of working in secondary schools, the study identified three main themes which together capture their perceptions of LEANS suitability in this context: relevance to adolescent experiences, pedagogy, and school fit. This work is an official part of the LEANS project, conducted as a 10-week student mini-project on the Translational Neuroscience PhD Programme, and originally submitted as an assignment to the University of Edinburgh Medical School Biomedical Teaching Organisation (15/12/21). The complete LEANS resource pack can be downloaded at the LEANS project webpage. https://salvesen-research.ed.ac.uk/lean

Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS): Evaluation of the LEANS resource pack in mainstream primary schools

Background: The LEANS resource was co-developed by a neurodiverse team of researchers (including the authors listed on this pre-registration, in particular AA and SF-W) and eight experienced educators, including neurodivergent individuals. It was created through a process of design cycles (online meetings and individual preparation work) and resulted in 7 units: Introduction to neurodiversity, learning and thinking differently, communication and understanding, getting along together at school, is that fair?, different ways to make a friendship and neurodiversity in our classroom Purpose: The LEANS resource has been created to be delivered by teachers to whole classes of primary school pupils (age 8-11) to inform children about neurodiversity and to increase positive attitudes and intended actions towards neurodiversity and inclusion. Each of the 7 units are designed to communicate key points and combine hands-on activities, story content about a neurodiverse classroom and supporting materials (e.g., posters, videos) to do so. This preregistration is for the evaluation of LEANS which will test for changes in children’s knowledge of neurodiversity, and attitudes and intended actions in relation to neurodiversity and inclusion, following participation in LEANS (baseline and outcome-test measures to be completed by children). Although not included in this pre-registration, the LEANS evaluation will also include questions for all children about their perceptions of new knowledge and experiences of LEANS. In addition, individual interviews with children (n = ~20) with diagnosed/undiagnosed additional support needs, will be carried out, to learn about their experiences of LEANS and assess for potential harms. Furthermore, although not included in this pre-registration, the LEANS evaluation will also include data from teacher completed diaries during delivery of LEANS, to assess the acceptability and feasibility of LEANS for use in mainstream primary school classrooms. Note: this pre-registration does incorporate some content taken from teacher diaries regarding implementation fidelity. We will use teacher-self reports of their delivery of LEANS (e.g. any content missed-out or partially-delivered) for a sensitivity analysis excluding participants who exposure to LEANS learning materials falls below a pre-set threshold (see below for details). Research Questions 1. Does engaging with the LEANS resource result in children being able to demonstrate knowledge of neurodiversity at outcome? 2. Does engaging with the LEANS resource result in more positive attitudes and intended actions towards neurodiversity and inclusion, compared to baseline? Note on Measures: Knowledge of neurodiversity will be assessed via the Neurodiversity Knowledge Quiz (NDKQ), a measure created specifically for this project. One single item from the NDKQ (the “neurodiversity knowledge target item”) will also be administered at baseline to permit examination of change in knowledge. Two additional screening items (items 1 and 2) are included in the NDKQ to assess for engagement in LEANS. These will not be included when calculating the outcome variable, but will be used to screen participants for attention to the curriculum materials – a pre-requisite for knowledge. In a sensitivity analysis, we will repeat the main analysis after excluding children who fail both of these screening items – see Exclusions section for details. Attitudes and intended actions towards neurodiversity and inclusion will be assessed via the Attitudes and Actions Quiz (AAQ), a questionnaire created specifically for this project. Both questionnaires (including separate baseline and outcome versions of the AAQ) and a scoring guide are available as supplementary materia