An affective computer-mediated learning model for children with special needs

In education, it is important to have good communication and interaction between educators and learners to produce a conducive learning environment. However, this is rather difficult for learner with disabilities such as children with Cerebral Palsy and Autism. Their learning problems arise due to their speech problems and intellectual disabilities. Having speech problem leads them to have lower ability in conveying their expressions to educators. Furthermore, some of them are slow in learning due to intellectual disabilities. The special children require more time and attention from the educators. Repetition of learning materials is one of the common solutions. They would also learn better from one-to-one learning approach. Various computer assisted learning programs have been adopted generally to supplement the special children’s learning in different areas. However, there are limitations within the existing computer assisted learning programs. This research is inspired by the concepts Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment and Affective Tutoring System. To assist the special children’s learning, this research proposed an affective computer-mediated learning model which adapts to learners’ emotions and has an educator representation i.e. a virtual tutor to deliver the learning materials and interact with special child in one-to-one learning. The virtual tutor communicates with the special child by responding to his/her facial expressions. Repetition of learning contents can be done to accommodate the learning needs of the special children. Through this research, we designed, implemented and evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed affective computer-mediated learning model in assisting the learning of the special children. We conducted a preliminary testing on the first prototype. The initial findings were used to model the final prototype. For the testing of final prototype, we carried out pre-intervention and post-intervention experiments with 20 participants from a special education school in Kuching. Pre-intervention experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the non-affective computer-mediated learning model. Post-intervention experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the affective computer-mediated learning model. The overall results showed that the proposed affective learning model is able to assist the learning of the special children.