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Design and Implementation of an Adaptive Architecture for Teaching Reading Skills to Children with Dyslexia Using the Taban Robot

Fazli Khalaf, Mohammad Hossein | 2025

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 58871 (08)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Mechanical Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Taheri, Alireza; Meghdari, Ali
  7. Abstract:
  8. Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder characterized by reading performance that is significantly below the expected level based on an individual’s age, intelligence, and education. In recent years, modern educational technologies, including social robots, have played a crucial role in delivering instructional content, particularly for individuals with special needs and learning difficulties. This study aims to design and implement an interactive, adaptive, and robot-assisted educational system for the rehabilitation of Persian-speaking children with dyslexia, and to evaluate its effectiveness in a multi-session clinical study. This objective comprises two dimensions: a technical dimension and a clinical dimension. The technical dimension, which constitutes the primary objective of this research, includes implementing an Android-based application, robot-assisted interactive games, an adaptive algorithm, and LLM-based speech games. The clinical dimension focuses on conducting multi-session training sessions and evaluating the system’s effectiveness. To this end, the social robot Taban was selected due to its technical and interactive capabilities for use in sessions. Subsequently, adaptive educational games and LLM-agent-based speech games were implemented to strengthen children’s reading and phonological awareness skills. Additionally, updates to the Taban robot’s software involved redesigning the user interface, developing educational scenarios, and adding control features to guide its behavior. Subsequently, the acceptability of the new educational games in interaction with the robot was examined in a session with both typically developing and dyslexic children, aiming to evaluate the system’s performance among users with different cognitive characteristics. Questionnaire results showed that the system had high acceptability and adaptability in both groups. Additionally, dyslexic children performed significantly worse than typically developing children in the games (p < 0.05). Finally, a two-month clinical study using a single-subject design was conducted with 7 boys with dyslexia from the first and second grades over 10 sessions. The study consisted of three assessment phases—baseline, pre-test, and post-test—to measure reading skills, along with a 7-session training program based on the proposed system. System performance results indicated that the adaptive algorithm successfully dynamically adjusted exercise difficulty levels based on user performance, and these difficulty variations were consistently reflected in the children’s performance metrics. Furthermore, the children’s performance in the review session of the educational games was significantly better than in the preceding thematic sessions. Additionally, based on the effect size index, all participants demonstrated significant improvement in either the standardized Phonological Awareness test or specific components of the NAMA test
  9. Keywords:
  10. Social Robotics ; Large Language Model ; Adaptive Teaching ; Phonological Awareness ; Dyslexia

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