The Future of Care: Randazzo and Antonucci explain how AI can help students with special needs
The training programme The Future of Care also involves the world of education and inclusion, with contributions from biomedical engineer Mattia Randazzo and clinical psychologist Lorenzo Antonucci, both from the Don Gnocchi Foundation. At the heart of the initiative is Pathway Companion, a project funded by Google.org and developed by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale in collaboration with the Fondazione Don Gnocchi, ITLogiX and Roma Tre University.
Supporting learners: the world of SEN
The main objective of the initiative is ambitious: ‘the development of a free web platform to support students with special educational needs aged between 8 and 16, particularly those with difficulties in reading and text comprehension’. Special Educational Needs (SEN) represent a broad category that includes disabilities, specific learning difficulties (such as SLD or ADHD) and socio-economic or cultural disadvantages. As Antonucci emphasised, this is an urgent need: “It is estimated that around 8% of students enrolled in various school levels and stages fall into this category – almost one in ten students.”
Three AI engines for ‘tailor-made’ teaching
The platform does not merely provide standard tools, but uses generative artificial intelligence to adapt to each individual student. The system is based on three distinct engines:
- Identification: enables the teacher to find the most effective compensatory tools for the student.
- Adaptation: transforms teaching materials by applying the chosen tools.
- Personalisation: tracks the student’s individual development over time.
A key point is the central role of the educator: “all steps carried out by the AI require the approval of the lead teacher, who will be the only one to interact with the platform”.
Simplifying without dumbing down
Pathway Companion tackles complex challenges such as text comprehension, for which dedicated digital tools are often lacking. Drawing on clinical experience and the literature, the team has devised rules to “simplify texts from a syntactic and lexical perspective, so as to lighten the linguistic load whilst retaining the content required by teachers”. The AI also assists the student by extracting key information, such as characters, places and facts, to guide their understanding.
The ultimate goal, as stated by Randazzo, is to offer “a supportive environment for adaptive and personalised learning that will enable the principle of maximum inclusion and higher-quality education to be realised”.
