Perceptions of students with autism regarding higher education support services

There is an increase in the number of students with autism accessing higher education (HE). There is also emerging literature about good practice for supporting these students in the HE context. However, there is still very little information concerning which specific services students with autism want. This study addresses this gap by gathering the views regarding the support services of the students in one HE setting. Fifteen students participated in this study and completed a questionnaire to share their views. One of the most significant findings was that while students use only the services which they need, they appreciated having the option to access a variety of services when needed. According to the students, the most helpful services are considered to be the following:- personal mentoring, transitional services, mental health services and the support to complete their application for Disabled Students' Allowances (DSAs.. Students identified disadvantages which included lack of communication among services as well as the limited staff awareness of autism. This is a small-scale study, but the evidence which emerges from it indicates the need for further research in the field

Affective Computational Model to Extract Natural Affective States of Students with Asperger Syndrome (AS) in Computer-based Learning Environment

This study was inspired by looking at the central role of emotion in the learning process, its impact on students’ performance; as well as the lack of affective computing models to detect and infer affective-cognitive states in real time for students with and without Asperger Syndrome (AS). This model overcomes gaps in other models that were designed for people with autism, which needed the use of sensors or physiological instrumentations to collect data. The model uses a webcam to capture students’ affective-cognitive states of confidence, uncertainty, engagement, anxiety, and boredom. These states have a dominant effect on the learning process. The model was trained and tested on a natural-spontaneous affective dataset for students with and without AS, which was collected for this purpose. The dataset was collected in an uncontrolled environment and included variations in culture, ethnicity, gender, facial and hairstyle, head movement, talking, glasses, illumination changes and background variation. The model structure used deep learning (DL) techniques like convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). DL is the-state-of-art tool that used to reduce data dimensionality and capturing non-linear complex features from simpler representations. The affective model provide reliable results with accuracy 90.06%. This model is the first model to detected affective states for adult students with AS without physiological or wearable instruments. For the first time, the occlusions in this model, like hand over face or head were considered an important indicator for affective states like boredom, anxiety, and uncertainty. These occlusions have been ignored in most other affective models. The essential information channels in this model are facial expressions, head movement, and eye gaze. The model can serve as an aided-technology for tutors to monitor and detect the behaviors of all students at the same time and help in predicting negative affective states during learning process

Cultural basis of social ‘deficits’ in autism spectrum disorders

There is very little research that specifically looks at how autism spectrum disorders are perceived in various communities. This qualitative research was conducted with parents who had children on the autistic spectrum belonging to four different ethnic communities (White British, Somali, West African and South Asian- 63 in total) and living in the UK. The study found that the importance that the parents give to various social skills varied on the basis of their cultural background and the gender of the parent. This is an important aspect to consider while providing support and services to individuals on the autism spectrum and their family members if the services have to be appropriate for their needs. This consideration would also enable the individuals on the autism spectrum to develop appropriate social skills required within their cultural groups. This is a preliminary study and further research on the topic is required