Adapting E-Learning to Dyslexia Type: An Experimental Study to Evaluate Learning Gain and Perceived Usability

Abstract

Dyslexia is a universal specific learning disability that is characterised by poor spelling, word reading, and fluency. Adaptive e-learning is becoming more common, but there is little work on adaptation focused on the needs and characteristics of dyslexic students. In particular, there is very little work that investigates adaptivity based on a student’s dyslexia type. This despite the type of dyslexia being a critical factor in determining the most appropriate teaching and learning. Also, previous research has overlooked rigorously designed and controlled evaluations of the system’s effectiveness. Therefore, there is a great deal of progress yet to be achieved for dyslexia, especially for Arabic dyslexics. The contribution of this paper is investigating whether adapting learning material based upon an individual’s dyslexia type will improve learning performance, and also the perception of the usability of the system. An experiment was conducted with 40 Arabic dyslexic children producing statistically significant results. They indicate that adapting learning material according to dyslexia type yields significantly better learning gain (short- and long-term) and perceived level of usability than without adaptation.