Supporting practitioners in social story interventions: the ISISS Authoring Tool

Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) have difficulties in learning social and communication skills. This leads to impairments in social interaction, including lack of understanding others’ intentions, emotions, and mental states, and impairments in communication both verbal and nonverbal. One of the most widely used interventions that addresses social and communication skills is the “social story”. A social story aims to support children with ASC in coping with their own behaviour. Practitioners use social stories to present specific scenarios and to help children understand how they should respond. However, the development of social stories is time consuming, and teachers comment that it is difficult to share them as a resource for others or to customise them to individual children, using their current tools. This thesis explores how a social story authoring tool can be designed, developed and evaluated. The final aim is to better support practitioners in writing, using and assessing social stories for children with ASC compared with their current approaches. A series of studies with practitioners and researchers was carried out to inform the design of a social story authoring tool and to evaluate it. A framework for social stories was built with the purpose of informing the design. Based on this framework, a prototype was iteratively designed and developed. The final prototype (ISISSImproving Social Interaction through Social Stories) was evaluated with practitioners with experience in social story interventions. The evaluation showed that ISISS is perceived by practitioners to be a considerable improvement over their current approaches. The methodology employed in this research combines Action Research, User-Centred Design and Participatory Design. Practitioners and researchers were empowered with different roles at different research stages in order to maximise their contributions to the development process

Supporting Children’s Metacognition with a Facial Emotion Recognition based Intelligent Tutor System

The present study aims to investigate the relationship between emotions experienced during learning and metacognition in typically developing (TD) children and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This will assist us in using machine learning (ML) to develop a facial emotion recognition (FER) based intelligent tutor system (ITS) to support children’s metacognitive monitoring process in order to enhance their learning outcomes. In this paper, we first report the results of our preliminary research, which utilized an ML-based FER algorithm to detect four spontaneous epistemic emotions (i.e., neutral, confused, frustrated, and boredom) and six spontaneous basic emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). Subsequently, we adapted an application (‘BrainHood’) to create the ‘Meta-BrainHood’, that embedded our proposed ML-based FER algorithm to examine the relationship between facial emotion expressions and metacognitive monitoring performance in TD children and those with ASD. Finally, we outline the future steps in our research, which adopts the outcomes of the first two steps to construct an ITS to improve children’s metacognitive monitoring performance and learning outcomes.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Human Information Communication Desig

Aggressiveness within the high school students sector: Comparison between two measurement instruments

AbstractA cross-sectional study has been conducted within Timis County (Romania) in order to evaluate some paramount health-risk behaviour patterns in the case of high-school students. Eleven items of a certain instrument (CORT 2004 Inventory) addressed aggressive behaviour. The Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI) has also been applied, in order to analyse spontaneous aggression coupled with other personality features. Statistical analysis has proven decreasing correlations of FPI aggressiveness within certain selected CORT items in gravity diminishing order. The measurement instruments used in our study provide reliable information for oriented decisions regarding the improvement of education

STRESS CONCENTRATION DUE TO A SPHERICAL VOID UNDER HERTZIAN CONTACT

The present paper presents the method of estimating the stress concentrator effect of a spherical void from an elastic half-space. An essential part consists in estimation of FEM error by finding the contact pressure from half-plane using an analytical method. Next, the stress concentrator effect of the same void, except for placed into elastic space, is found