Project description
Digital platform to change the educational paradigm for students with special needs
Children with neurodevelopmental disorders face increased challenges at school, where they are called on to utilise and maximise their skills in settings that have not been designed with their particular needs in mind. To address this issue, the EU-funded EMPOWER project seeks to facilitate the educational experience of these children by capitalising on the advantages provided by the digital age. To that end, it will create an innovative platform involving various relevant stakeholders with the aim of improving these students’ executive function and emotional self-regulation, skills considered key in helping them derive maximum benefits from their education. The new concept will be tested across schools to validate the significance of technology-augmented education and enable the transition to inclusive educational environments.
Objective
Given technological developments in other domains and lessons from the pandemic, there is a strong push to invest in technology-augmented education. However, much remains unknown; for example, what technological abilities are useful in education, how they can be deployed, what training needs arise, and what shape future policies governing this should take. EMPOWER contributes to resolving these questions by developing novel technological support for the education of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). This use case is, in many ways challenging, and thus ideally suited to 1) make a positive impact on the educational needs of these children, and 2) highlight the potential and limitations of technology-augmented education in a way that can inform future developments generally.
NDDs affect approximately 15% of children aged 3 to 17 years. These children can experience difficulties with language and speech, motor skills, behaviour, memory, learning, or other neurological functions and benefit from education tailored to their needs. EMPOWER creates a novel platform based on new paradigms from psychology that suggest that Executive Function (EF) and Emotional Self Regulation are two key sets of skills to target in the educational intervention for these students. The core output of EMPOWER is thus an educational platform, co-created by all involved stakeholders, that facilitates the improvement of these key skills in children with NDDs. The platform will be tested and evaluated in school settings with all stakeholders involved according to the strict standards of a randomized clinical trial. In addition to technological advances, the lessons learned from the development and deployment of this platform will provide valuable insights into the needs and possibilities for training teachers in the use of new technologies as well as input into future policies governing technology in education, including, in particular refined ethical frameworks.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseducational sciencesdidactics
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic healthepidemiologypandemics
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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
46010 Valencia
Spain