Diverse Learning Technologies: Helping students with LD, ADHD, and ASD reach their full potential in STEM (2016)

Description

The Landmark College Institute for research and Training has been exploring how best to use technology to help students with disabilities reach their full potential. The current project explores the role of Social Presence in helping students with disabilities grasp complex statistics concepts.

NSF Award: 1420198

Discussion

This discussion took place during the TERC Video Showcase Event Nov. 14-21, 2023. Discussion is now closed.

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Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki

November 13, 2023 3:45 pm

Thank you for your interest in this work. While this research occurred prior to the pandemic, it’s findings have been often cited when considering how best to support neurodivergent learners in remote learning. Please feel free to ask any questions related to this work that we might be able to help answer.

Nuria Jaumot-Pascual

November 14, 2023 1:23 pm

Hi! I loved the way the video starts! Love the music and the integration of what happens on the screen with the rhythm of the song.

I am interested in learning what Social Presence means and how you incorporated it into remote learning of complex statistics concepts.

Looking forward to the conversation!

Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki

November 14, 2023 4:05 pm

Reply to Nuria Jaumot-Pascual

Thanks Nuria. This video was created by one of the very talented students at Landmark College. Social presence is a bit difficult to define but essentially is the degree to which you see others in an online space as real human beings that you are interacting with and the degree to which you feel a genuine social connection with them. What we found was that when it comes to neurodivergent students, it was important to balance social presence with some of the social, attention, and language processing barriers that sometimes come with synchronous social interactions. You can find more details on our findings in this paper.

Nuria Jaumot-Pascual

November 16, 2023 10:03 am

Reply to Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki

Very interesting to see that though participants preferred synchronous interactions, they performed better in asynchronous ones. Do you know why this may be the case?

Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki

November 16, 2023 12:44 pm

Reply to Nuria Jaumot-Pascual

That is one the areas we speculate about at the end of the paper but I don’t have concrete evidence for it. I believe that there is likely a genuine benefit to the synchronous interaction but that the barriers faced by many neurodivergent learners in those spaces overwhelms any benefit that may be realized.

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