Tues, 11/06/2019
The test data produced by H2020 Project MaTHiSiS Managing Affective-learning THrough Intelligent atoms and Smart InteractionS, thanks to the collaboration of 150 students with special needs aged 3-19 and over 100 teachers, psychologists and tutors using the educational platform in both curricular and extracurricular activities, was analysed by two English universities: Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham. The results were presented in the “Report on transferable lessons from educational pilots: Scientific and pedagogical evaluation of MaTHiSiS”.
Annaleda Mazzucato and Andrea Cira, who managed testing in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom for the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, address the results that emerged from the research project.
The first interesting result is the statistically significant impact of student engagement levels on didactic sessions. In other words, students are more involved in what they do, and their results improve. This reinforces the basic tenets on which MaTHiSiS is founded, such as the “theory of flux,” developed by Hungarian Psychologist Csíkszentmihályi, confirming the relation between emotional states and learning.
Moreover – and this is true both for autistic spectrum and learning disorder students – the experimental group revealed a higher engagement rate than the control group. This leads us to conclude that the interpretation of the emotional state and the consequent system “choice” on how to conduct the didactic session increases student engagement levels.
The analysis of teacher feedback points to a strong interest in MaTHiSiS as a didactic support tool, especially for students with special needs, although the system also presents challenges due to its non-linear approach to teaching that is hard to harmonise with the scholastic system.
In conclusion, after three years of testing in dozens of schools in three European states on hundreds of students and teachers, the MaTHiSiS Platform represents a support tool for learning. It’s adaptation and personalization features are especially useful for students with learning disorders or on the autistic spectrum. MaTHiSiS implements and emotional learning model through artificial intelligence didactic tools. Something that was once defined as futuristic, but today is a challenge that concerns all of us.
Project results are available at mathisis-project.eu/results.
