Systematic review of informatics education for people with mental disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is a systematic review of research in the field of studying informatics education for persons with mental disabilities conducted in the period 2017-2022, included in the Google Scholar international database. With the help of descriptive and quantitative methodology, the most significant data are presented to solve the problems of accessibility of IT education for a narrow audience of people with mental disabilities, what successful pedagogical strategies are used to ensure the quality of computer science education for students with disabilities, namely, which successful learning strategies are used. The results show that a small number of studies are devoted to the problem of teaching informatics to people with mental disabilities: 11 scientific publications out of 421 were selected based on the criteria for selecting research that are valid for the purpose of the search. The analysis of these studies showed isolated experiments in the USA, Great Britain, Chile, Canada, France, Spain, which led to successful learning outcomes, despite the complexity of the organization of the educational process. This proves the fact that this category of persons with disabilities is undervalued for IT education. Such successful learning strategies as pear-to-pear training, project and team work, stand-up meetings, reflection, driver-navigator reception, support group, tracking, collaboration with GitHub service were used. In most cases, highly functional autistic people were covered by training. The remaining categories of mental disorders (such as low-functioning autistic people, students with mental disabilities, with Alzheimer's disease and others) were not fully reflected in the studies