The Design And Empirical Study Of Computer-assist Assessment System For Special Children

In recent years, with the improvement of economy and the development of society, government and the community gradually paid more attention to special education. Special education is a kind of education aiming at special children who may have one or a few defects in intelligence, emotion, sense, behavior or physiology. In the group of special children, children with physical defect would never restore while the children with mental disorder may be cured after a series of early intervention training. Autism, learning disabilities, attention disorders and growth retardations occupy a large proportion in the group of children with mental disorder, and the special children presented in our work refers to these children. Due to the large individual differences among these children, an accurate capability assessment on them is very important to establish effective interventions.The popular methods to assess capability of special children mainly rely on various assessment scales, the interview or questionnaire survey with parents or teachers, and the direct observation and analysis of special children. With the developing of information-based education, computer-assist techniques have been gradually applied to the intervention on special children. And these kinds who are born lacking of communication and social skills would prefer like playing computer games rather than having a short talk with others. The traditional capability assessments often rely a lot on the descriptions from the third-party but not children being evaluated themselves, thus the assessment may not be accurate. Based on these factors stated above, we designed a capability assessment system based on computer-assist techniques for special children, and then we conduct an empirical study on it.The capability assessment system based on computer-assist techniques for special children consists of 14 human-computer interaction games which are designed based on cognitive psychology, child development theory and the theory of special knowledge in child psychology and so on. By different strategies of combination mode, different games are chosen to set the assessment project which can respectively assess the perception ability, cognition ability, self-care ability, language skills and social skills. The scores and time spent on accomplishing a project by the children are recorded in the background of the system, and then the assessment criterion is set according to the data and theory. The system is presented by interactive games, so it’s born convenient, objective and interesting.To verify the effectiveness of the designed system, we got a lot relevant information and conducted the empirical study in three schools which included two normal schools and one special school. Through the method of document analysis, we verified the rationality of our design in the level of theory based on the existing related researches and the cognitive psychology. Through the interviews, questionnaires, observation analysis together with the assessment results in our experiments conducted on different children, we verified the actual effectiveness of our assessment system. And we successfully tested out some shortcomings of some children’s abilities through our assessment system in the practical diagnosis.