Search

This paper examines the educational efficacy of a learning environment in which children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Conditions\ud (ASC) engage in social interactions with an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual agent and where a human practitioner acts in support of\ud the interactions. A multi-site intervention study in schools across the UK was conducted with 29 children with ASC and learning\ud difficulties, aged 4-14 years old. For reasons related to data completeness and amount of exposure to the AI environment, data for\ud 15 children was included in the analysis. The analysis revealed a significant increase in the proportion of social responses made by\ud ASC children to human practitioners. The number of initiations made to human practitioners and to the virtual agent by the ASC\ud children also increased numerically over the course of the sessions. However, due to large individual differences within the ASC\ud group, this did not reach significance. Although no evidence of transfer to the real-world post-test was shown, anecdotal evidence of\ud classroom transfer was reported. The work presented in this paper offers an important contribution to the growing body of research\ud in the context of AI technology design and use for autism intervention in real school contexts. Specifically, the work highlights key\ud methodological challenges and opportunities in this area by leveraging interdisciplinary insights in a way that (i) bridges between\ud educational interventions and intelligent technology design practices, (ii) considers the design of technology as well as the design of\ud its use (context and procedures) on par with one another, and (iii) includes design contributions from different stakeholders, including\ud children with and without ASC diagnosis, educational practitioners and researchers.

This report conducts a rigorous and independent peer-review of the five separate Volumes of the ‘Benchmarking Autism Services Efficacy,’ (BASE) report by Dillenburger, McKerr, and Jordan (2015). The BASE report was produced by Professor Karola Dillenburger, from the School of Education’s Centre for Behaviour Analysis, Queen’s University Belfast, and is available online. The research was funded by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM).

The Transform Autism Education (TAE) project focused on the domain of ‘good autism\ud practice’ in the education of pupils with autism in the UK, Greece and Italy with the overall\ud objectives to:\ud • Research good autism practice in education.\ud • Create professional development programmes in Greece and Italy.\ud • Enhance the knowledge and practice of school staff.\ud • Facilitate the inclusion of autistic children in primary schools in those countries.\ud Funded by the European Commission through Erasmus Plus Key Action 2, Strategic Partnerships\ud scheme, and led by Principal Investigator Dr. Karen Guldberg, the project involved a range of\ud Greek, Italian and UK partners. It employed the Autism Education Trust (AET) collaborative\ud training schemes in the UK as a founding model. While the requirements of each country were\ud distinct, and so necessitated careful adaptations of the materials to their specific needs, what\ud united all aspects of the project was a desire to improve the educational inclusion of autistic\ud children, as well as their general experiences in school and their outcomes.

Experimental intervention studies constitute the current dominant research designs in the autism education field. Such designs are based on a ‘knowledge transfer’ model of evidence-based practice in which research is conducted by researchers, and is then ‘transferred’ to practitioners to enable them to implement evidence-based interventions. While these research designs contribute important knowledge, they lead to a gap between what the research evidence may prescribe and what happens in practice, with a concomitant disparity between the priorities of researchers and practitioners. This paper discusses findings from the ESRC funded ‘SHAPE’ project, which adopted a different model of evidence-based practice, focusing on knowledge co-construction. Pupils (N=8), teachers (N=10), a Speech and Language Therapist and a parent in three different school communities investigated creative ways in which children’s social communication skills could be enhanced through technology use. Through a participatory methodology, digital stories were used as a method to enable engagement with the practical realities of the classroom and empower practitioners to construct and share their own authentic narratives. Participants articulated precise knowledge about the learning opportunities afforded to them and their pupils through quality interactions that were mediated by the technologies, as evidenced through digital stories. The Shape project shows that it is feasible to develop methodologies that enable genuine knowledge co-construction with school practitioners, parents and pupils. Such co-construction could offer realistic opportunities for pedagogical emancipation and innovation in evidence-based practice as an alternative to the currently dominant and narrow model of knowledge transfer.

The book is clearly structured, consisting of two sections. Initially, the book provides context, rationale and an articulation of the authors’ position, whilst the second section draws on the authors’ own research to provide ways in which primary student teachers and teachers might use and develop talk across some primary curriculum subjects in their practice.