Exploring Neurodiverse Perspectives on the Design of Virtual-Reality Environments

• In Event: Emerging Technologies for Supporting Neurodiverse Learners

Abstract

Finding appropriate ways to engage students who learn differently is an ongoing challenge for educational curriculum designers. Innumerable variables could impact the learner experience in disparate ways for cognitively diverse students. Recently, there have been efforts to create online learning experiences in virtual environments for students who match this profile. However, there is still a paucity of research related to the design features that most empower access for these students. Creation of a custom virtual reality environment, which accounts for these needs in a gamified format called “Mission to Europa Prime'', is the objective of present research.
This creation and research effort represents an attempt to explore the most effective virtual design elements for cognitively diverse students, as well as which diagnostic profiles most consistently map to what elements. Participants were recruited from neurodiverse populations for a study with two parts. Part one explores participants' thoughts, attitudes, and experiences surrounding virtual environments, as well as their diagnostic and demographic variables. Part two assesses participants’ preferences for various hues, brightnesses, and clutter levels of various virtual environments.
The study has yielded insights about student behavior in virtual environments, as related to both the variables in question (hue, brightness, and clutter) and the metrics of persistence and engagement in the assessment itself. Preliminary results from the study suggest participant preferences, with regards to the hue, brightness, and clutter, are complex and may map to their own discrete clusters. In addition, the process of cleaning the data from part two led to some interesting findings, as it involved identifying points of participant disengagement with the study. Several measures of disengagement were employed. For example, participants exhibit several distinct patterns in their response times, demonstrating a varied response pattern across the study or a “fan” shaped pattern, wherein the participants sped up over time. For some participants, disengagement was identifiable when their response times became too quick to be feasible. Disengagement could also be seen in the binary output patterns of some participants, where only one side of the binary response was given for prolonged periods of time. Questions thus persist related to the possibility some participants with executive function challenges may have been systematically eliminated from the analysis due to the disengagement-related exclusion criteria and difficulties with persistence endemic to that population.
Future research will incorporate more complex design variables. Future research will also consider refinements to the study itself, as a study intended to provide insight on the design features of virtual reality environments that most empower access to learning for cognitively diverse students need to be inclusive for all for cognitively diverse participants.

Authors

• Zachary Alstad, TERC Inc.

• Teon Edwards, TERC

• Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki, TERC