Use of recommendation models to provide support to dyslexic students

Abstract

Dyslexia is the most widespread specific learning disorder and significantly impair different cognitive domains. This, in turn, negatively affects dyslexic students during their learning path. Therefore, specific support must be given to these students. In addition, such a support must be highly personalized, since the problems generated by the disorder can be very different from one to another. In this work, we explored the possibility of using AI to suggest the most suitable supporting tools for dyslexic students, so as to provide a targeted help that can be of real utility. To do this, we relied on recommendation algorithms, which are a branch of machine learning, that aim to detect personal preferences and provide the most suitable suggestions. We hence implemented and trained three collaborative-filtering recommendation models, namely an item-based, a user-based and a weighted-hybrid model, and studied their performance on a large database of 1237 students’ information, collected with a self-evaluating questionnaire regarding all the most used supporting strategies and digital tools. Each recommendation model was tested with three different similarity metrics, namely Pearson correlation, Euclidean distance and Cosine similarity. The obtained results showed that a recommendation system is highly effective in suggesting the optimal help tools/strategies for everyone, with an error less then 12%. As a further evidence of the effectiveness of the implemented system, its precision was 0.85 and its recall was 0.83. The best performing filter was the hybrid one, when Pearson’s correlation is used to measure the distance among users and/or items. In addition, in a final testing performed on 50 students, dyslexic students who used the recommendation algorithm increased their academic scores of almost 1 point in a 1 to 10 scale, showing higher learning performance compared to students who did not use it. This demonstrates that the proposed approach is successful and can be used as a new and effective methodology to support students with dyslexia.