Technology-based process for supporting university students with adhd

Resum

Education promotes personal and social development to achieve the ideals of peace, freedom and justice and thus helps reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance and war. However, the question is whether education is contributing to the development of more inclusive societies, or, conversely, is playing social exclusion and generating different forms of discrimination within education systems. This is because education systems have been oriented towards the development of homogeneous and uniform practices that respond only to the educational and learning needs of a majority student population considered standard. Based on this, it can be said that education systems have a historical debt to society, specifically to those people who do not fit into that standard label. In this context, international and national organizations and policies seek to move from a homogeneous to a diversity-based approach. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer the opportunity to respond to the multifaceted individual differences because they have the potential to create highly versatile and flexible educational and training environments. It can provide students with equal access to knowledge, regardless of their preferences, diverse learning needs, gender, geographic location, socio-economic or ethnic background, illness or disability, or any other circumstance that would normally hinder the provision of high-quality education. In this context, e-Learning has become an essential tool for teaching large numbers of diverse students because it provides and integrates a wide range of teaching resources and materials (e.g. video, audio, text, subtitles or sign language, multiple languages, and easily understandable expressions), that can be adapted to suit a variety of learning needs and preferences. In traditional learning, teachers can easily have an understanding of how their students work and learn. However, in e-Learning it is more difficult for teachers to monitor how their students behave and learn in the system. As well as identify if students have any specific awkwardness in their educational process. The Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) applied to education emerged as a strategy to offer e-Learning training processes tailored to the characteristics and needs of students, but the truth is that most of the research focused on continuing to offer more and more sophisticated tools for a regular population, leaving aside those who from history have not been considered. In this thesis, the AHS is used to generate e-Learning processes that consider the characteristics of university students who suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Overall, it was proposed a solution that ranges from symptoms detection to academic intervention. Specifically, it was developed a student model based on personal, demographic, academic, behavioral conduct, background and cognitive performance information to create personal student profiles, which indicate if an e-Learning student could have ADHD symptoms. After that, considering preferences and strengths of people suffering from ADHD, two didactic strategies were integrated in academic processes, one based on video games and the other one based on gamification. Additionally, a third strategy based on the implementation of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) was integrated given the advantages of this framework to help reduce barriers that do not allow quality-training processes for all. The results showed firstly, that it is possible to identify symptoms of ADHD in e-Learning enviroments; and secondly, the positive impact of video games, gamification and UDL not only on the academic performance but also on the learning experience of all the students, students suffering from ADHD included. Consequently, on the whole, this thesis contributes to the knowledge in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in the following aspects: 1) Identification of information that allows inferring whether an e-Learning student could have symptoms of ADHD. 2) Evidence about the positive effect of video games, gamification and implementation of UDL in academic performance and e-Learning experience of students suffering from ADHD. 3) The definition and development of a integral technological solution that groups several Web tools and which ranges from the symptoms detection to academic support considering the strengths, preferences and weaknesses of students suffering from ADHD in e-Learning contexts. 4) Evidence of being able to use e-Learning as a means for students with ADHD to carry out their training processes in an inclusive manner. KEY WORDS: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), e-Learning, Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS), Videogames, Gamification, Inclusive education, Universal Design for Learning (UDL).