- recognition of a need;
- problem definition;
- synthesis;
- analysis;
- implementation;
- evaluation.
Norman Powell 1, David Moore 1, John Gray 1, Janet Finlay 1, John Reaney 2
1 School of Computing, Leeds Metropolitan University , Beckett Park Campus, Leeds , LS6 3QS .
2 Student Services, Leeds Metropolitan University , City Site, Calverley Street , Leeds , LS1 3HE .
N.Powell@leedsmet.ac.uk
This paper explores some of the issues associated with teaching computer science to students with dyslexia. Issues associated with both student learning generally and computer science specifically are considered. The accessibility of teaching materials made available through virtual learning environments (VLEs) is addressed. Twelve resulting guidelines particularly relevant to students with dyslexia are outlined. More specifically to computer science, the issues associated with programming are explored through the development of a mapping of the features of dyslexia to the tasks involved in writing a computer program. Preliminary evidence, from both the wider dyslexia community with computer programming experience and some early interview results, are presented to both support the mapping and draw out other important issues.
dyslexia, computer programming, virtual learning environments
This paper describes results generated from a LTSN-ICS Development Fund project, entitled ‘Impact of Learning Disability on the Study of Computing’. This project seeks to investigate the impact of learning disabilities on students who are following a course of study in the computing curriculum. It will look at how best to deliver materials through the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and then focus on issues surrounding students with dyslexia and computer programming.
The introduction of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA, 2001) and the Disability Discrimination Act part IV (DDA, 1995) provides an opportunity and incentive to review teaching and learning methods and see how the needs of the students with special needs are addressed. In the case of a computing department, this should include general aspects, for example accessible provision of e-resources, and also domain specific aspects, for example programming. This paper looks at both of these aspects.
Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Met.) is a large (37,000 students) university of applied learning, with a policy of widening access to higher education. The School of Computing has approximately 1,500 students enrolled on a variety of HND and degree programmes, of these on average 20 are registered as dyslexic at any given time. This is in line with the occurrence of dyslexia across the University as a whole and the general higher education student population, 1.2 per cent to 1.5 per cent (The Singleton Report, 1999). There is, then, a substantial and persistent number of individuals that require support within the school.
The paper begins by outlining the sources of standards and guidelines relating to the provision of accessible Web based and e-learning materials and then highlights those considered particularly pertinent to students with dyslexia. It then focuses in on specific issues associated with computer programming and dyslexia. In order to do this, first the features of dyslexia, both negative and positive, are outlined. A model of the processes involved in computer programming is then proposed. This allows an interaction matrix of the features of dyslexia and the process stages of computer programming to be developed. Preliminary evidence is then presented from correspondents of a Dyslexia e-mail forum, which supports the interaction matrix and raises additional issues. The results of an interview with a Computer Science student with dyslexia are also presented.
Many VLEs, including WebCT, the VLE implementation adopted by Leeds Met. (along with many other Higher Education Institutions) are Web-based. As such, accessibility guidelines covering the provision of software, electronic based teaching materials and Web-based resources are all applicable. The first step in developing guidelines specific to dyslexic students, therefore, was a survey and analysis of existing generic standards and guidelines.
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA, 2001) and the Disability Discrimination Act part IV (DDA, 1995) do not make specific recommendations for the provision of electronic based material, however they do require that reasonable adjustment is made when a disabled student is placed, or likely to be placed, at a substantial disadvantage. Whilst not being prescriptive in the form of these adjustments, nevertheless, they do provide an impetus for such adjustments to be made.
There are three principal standard providers in the field of web accessibility:
In addition to these formal standards, there are many bodies that endorse them. Some of these bodies provide additional advice or guidance on how to achieve accessibility, notably:
This list is far from exhaustive, but shows that accessibility and the Web is quite rightly an important and well‑documented issue. For example, David Sloan (Sloan, 2002) provides a detailed treatment of creating accessible e-learning content, including automatic validation tools. Witt and McDermott (Witt and McDermott, 2002) also consider SENDA‑compliance of Web sites in further and higher education.
We are interested in focusing on guidelines that may be particularly beneficial to students with dyslexia. These guidelines were selected from among both the generic accessibility guidelines (CITA, 1998;W3C, 1999;TechDis, 2002) , which matched against known problems associated with dyslexia, and also those that the guideline provider particularly recommended for people with dyslexia or special learning difficulties (IMS, 2002;Rainger, 2003) . Twelve germane, recurrent themes that emerged from the standards and guidelines described above are:
These guidelines will help develop transportable and accessible Web pages with improved clarity, allowing the user to focus on the content. Further, following the off-shoot argument, that is lessons from the use of the technology in extraordinary human computer interaction might lead to helpful development of the technology for “general” use (Edwards, 1995), by catering for dyslexic students, non-dyslexic students may also benefit from these measures.
The discussion so far has focused on the general provision of e-learning material for students with dyslexia. Indeed, following the offshoot argument we argue that the points apply equally to any Web or electronic content for general use. As well as this domain independent concern of the accessibility of e-learning materials, it is also important to focus on the domain specific issues of particular importance for computer science, such as the impact of dyslexia on the ability to program or to learn to program. Given this, the skills required to be a computer programmer were matched by the authors to the features of dyslexia.
Dyslexia is commonly defined as a discrepancy between intelligence and language ability (British Dyslexics, 2003). The diagnostic tests vary with the age of the subject and the perspective of the assessor, who is usually an educational psychologist (Hammond and Hercules, 2003). The expression of dyslexia in each individual is also very varied; consequently the resulting profiles are very individual. However, the common theme in diagnosis is to gain a profile of general intelligence and language ability and identify any discrepancy. Whilst the definitions of dyslexia often focus on a discrepancy between intelligence and language ability, diagnosis is often based on discrepancies between sub-indices and sub-tests of the intelligence profile. The indicators of dyslexia are (Hammond and Hercules, 2003):
Dyslexics have difficulty in processing sequenced symbolic information. This is a disadvantage in a society that predominantly processes information and more importantly educates in this way. Brain scanning images support the idea that people with dyslexia lack distributed automatic processing of languages and consequently expend a great deal of energy in the frontal, strategic parts of the brain, compensating for this (Shaywitz et al, 1998).
It was felt that there was a danger that the research might emphasize merely the problems and that the exercise might over emphasize the negative aspects of dyslexia. An alternative model of dyslexia to seeing it as a special learning disability is to see it as an alternative learning style. This moves the perception of dyslexia from that of a disability to that of a difference. It has been suggested (West, 1997;Turner and Wooden, 2003) that dyslexics may be stronger at :
Whilst this does not in any way take away from the difficulties dyslexic students may have faced throughout their education, these may be abilities that are advantageous in particular situations, compensating for some difficulties. However, some empirical studies do not support this compensation model (Winner et al, 2001), suggesting instead that there is only comparable performance to non-dyslexics for some tasks and even a deficit in other visual tasks. Nevertheless, we would contend that the alternative learning style model still has valid , since students with dyslexia succeed through exploiting whatever alternative skills and abilities they have to compensate for the negative features of dyslexia, even though these may prove to be strengths relative to their own abilities rather than absolute strengths compared to the general population.
We have taken this behavioural view of dyslexia to avoid becoming embroiled in the issue of the competing theories of the causes of dyslexia (Ramus et al, 2003). There are three major theories for the causes of developmental dyslexia: the phonological theory, problems matching sounds to letters (Snowling, 1996); the magnocellular theory, problems with fine eye-tracking or detecting rapid changes in pitch (Stein and Talcott, 1999) and the cerebellar theory, problems in automizing learnt tasks (Nicolson et al, 1999). Whilst these theories are useful in shedding light on dyslexia, it is the symptoms or features of dyslexia which the dyslexic student is acutely aware of and which relate directly to their experience and practice.
Our understanding of dyslexia, as outlined above, enables us to consider how the task of software design is affected by the features of dyslexia. It is useful to break down this activity to the series of sub-tasks that are required to write a computer program. The view of the activity of programming used here is based a general model of the process of design (Shigley and Mitchell, 1993). The steps involved in the design or problem-solving cycle can be summarized as follows:
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The curved arrows indicate possible routes of iteration throughout the process, two are indicated, but many others are possible (Shigley and Mitchell, 1993).
These general steps in generating a design have specific connotations when applied to the specific task of programming:
There are many alternative perspectives and methodologies for generating a computer program or system, for example the System Development Life Cycle (SLDC) models such as the waterfall, fountain, spiral and rapid prototyping (Kay, 2002). It was considered that all of these methodologies are generally substantiations of the generic design methodology described above, and that the generic model would therefore be appropriate to use in this research.
As this model of the process makes clear, the generation of a computer program and its subsequent correcting and testing require a great many logical and organizational skills combined with a precise expression of syntax and variable names.
From the above model it may be seen that the general design and problem-solving tasks involved in programming require the skills that may be strong in dyslexic programmers. This may also be true ofsynthesis, looking at the program as a whole and how the elements interact seems a holistic activity; since people with dyslexia tend to think holistically (Hammond and Hercules, 2003). However, the skills required in analysis, breaking down the problem or system into its component parts and viewing them in a systematic logical sequence are processes that people with dyslexia may tend to find more difficult (Hammond and Hercules, 2003). Further, the more specific programming tasks, especially those associated with generating and correcting computer code, are more adversely affected by the negative features of dyslexia. For example misspelling variable names and syntax terms are obviously detrimental to the process of programming. In addition, remembering the minutiae of details involved in the program, such as the name and purpose of variables declared, what changes have been implemented to the code and what has yet to be implemented, places a considerable load on the short term memory, and hence could prove to be additionally taxing to a programmer with dyslexia. Similarly, keeping track of the developing structure of the program and what stage in the implementation has been reached, also ensuring items are implemented at an appropriate time; all seem to require organisational skills that may put a programmer with dyslexia at a disadvantage. Finally, the systematic testing and evaluation of the product requires organisational skills in its planning and execution in addition to the additional burden imposed on the short term memory of tracking down the cause of any unintended behaviour of the system.
These considerations are summarised by the interaction matrix in table 1, which was generated by considering tasks involved at each stage of the programming process and how the features of dyslexia may affect them. This hypothetical model requires validating with the experiences of computer programmers with dyslexia.
The mapping of the interaction matrix so far has developed a hypothetical model (table 1) in order to focus on the issues of computer programming and dyslexia. In order to solicit relevant opinions on the issues associated with the project in general, and to empirically study the hypothetical model in particular, a request for information about dyslexic people’s experience with programming was posted on an e‑mail forum that deals with issues of dyslexia. There were replies from five correspondents (A‑E) from this request and an additional relevant message (F) was posted prior to the inquiry. Comments from these sources will now be used to support the interaction matrix and identify any emerging issues. The correspondents were made up of:
The correspondents all seem to prefer working on the problem definition and synthesis stages compared to the other three stages of the program development:
The parts that I mainly enjoy is the initial thinking through the problem and structuring the problem and how to tackle it – Correspondent A.
I have no problems designing systems, thinking up algorithms and such – Correspondent B.
Visualization plays an important role in these stages:
Programmers tend to be visual problem solvers – Correspondent D.
It is definitely an advantage to be able to visualize a problem – Correspondent E.
Difficulties seem to occur during the implementation stage, where spelling and short-term memory becomes an issue:
Variable names sometimes cause problems as I don’t remember how I have spelt them each time. I often get problems with putting loops inside out or in the wrong order. The other and perhaps the main problem is trying to remember what things need doing in the program – Correspondent A.
These and the other comments all broadly support, we argue, the model postulated in table 1.
One of the additional issues that emerged was the importance of the tools that were used to assist programming:
I find the coloured code editors really helpful – Correspondent A.
Syntax colouring is heaven – Correspondent B.
The choices however are very individual:
Things I've found that helped: Visual development environments – Correspondent D.
I prefer working in console mode (Linux) less distractions from other things on the screen => less errors – Correspondent B.
Interestingly, all the respondents were very positive about the influence of their dyslexia on their ability to program, most recognized the issues and problems they faced but overall saw dyslexia as an aid to their programming.
I think in the nature of programming attracts the abilities that dyslexic people have – Correspondent A.
… I think Dyslexics benefit from their ability to picture things, which gives an advantage to all things Computer – Correspondent C.
Bar the inconvenience of more syntax errors, silly slips and omissions, I'm very happy to be dyslexic when programming – Correspondent D.
Dyslexia and programming has both disadvantages and advantages! – Correspondent E.
Indeed, some recommended it as a career for people with dyslexia:
CS is indeed a good vocation for dyslexic people – Correspondent B.
Programming is an arena where dyslexics can really flourish … I would always advise a dyslexic to look at programming as a possible vocation… – Correspondent D.
Correspondent F, an ICT consultant reports, reports a case of someone:
… who was assessed … as 'severely dyslexic'. She is now … a senior programming consultant with her own company … in her working group of seven people, six are severely dyslexic.
It should be stated that these views are not necessarily representative of the community of programmers with dyslexia at large. There are many levels of self-selection in this extremely convenience led sampling:
Nevertheless, we believe that the fact that these views were expressed is worthy of note, and that their contribution is very valuable.
Further evidence in support of the model in table 1 came from an interview with M, a final year multimedia student. M confirmed that the most immediate impact of dyslexia on his programming was associated with memory and spelling. He found it hard to remember details of the code and its ordering. He also found that getting the case of variables correct and mixing up letters in long variable names was problematic. He found that coloured syntax and predictive typing features embedded in Integrated Development Environments were a great help. Unlike the correspondents, he did not view his dyslexia as having any compensation, however he did consider that his visualization skills were a great benefit to him both in programming and more generally. In fact, his principal concern was not programming but learning either in lectures or from textbooks. He preferred to attend lectures as he found seeing and hearing the information more effective than reading it from notes or a book. He advocated either filming or recording lectures, as this made use of preferred communication channels and also facilitated reviewing more difficult aspects of the lecture.
Following the twelve accessibility guidelines proposed in this paper should benefit both dyslexic and other users by improving the clarity of the page and allowing the users to focus on the content of the material.
The evidence here suggests that dyslexic students bring to programming their visualization and creative problem solving skills as well as their more widely recognised difficulties in spelling, organization and short term memory.
The work to date has ignored the auxiliary skills that are required in order to learn how to program different languages, algorithms or conceptions. These skills should be considered in future work. As was seen in the preliminary interview, the delivery of teaching materials was an important issue.
The positive response of the correspondents suggests that far from looking at dyslexia as a problem in this field, it may actually have beneficial consequences. Indeed, it may also be beneficial to dyslexic computer science students to be made aware of these positive views. This may have the benefit of providing added impetus to overcome initial problems when learning to program. It appears that programming may be an arena where people with dyslexia can exploit their strengths, circumvent their weaknesses and even be empowered to create their own Assistive Technologies.
To quote from Correspondent D:
Make your own tools!!! Voice recognition, spell checking, data storage and visual modelling, these functionalities are all at your disposal as a programmer, and they're all useful to a dyslexic. If you need to be reminded to do things, want to store/call phone numbers by voice command, make your own contact management system that suits you!
In the light of these findings we will seek to validate the ideas so far developed and gain greater understanding of the concerns of computer science students with dyslexia, through a series of in depth interviews with such students. In the meantime, we believe that the guidelines and interaction matrix presented can help improve HE provision for dyslexic students in general, and dyslexic computing students in particular.
This paper is based on earlier work, which was reported in the 4 th LTSN-ICS Annual Conference Proceedings, ISBN 0-9541927-4-5 (Powell et al, 2003).
The authors would like to acknowledge support from the LTSN-ICS Development Fund. The provision provided by Leeds Metropolitan University to support this research. The help and advice of various members of the University in doing this work, including Arnold Maiden from Student Services. Also the students who have agreed to participate in the study. We would also like to thank the correspondents from the dyslexia e‑mail forum.
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