AI-Driven Innovation Using Multimodal and Personalized Adaptive Education for Students With Special Needs

This study provides an in-depth exploration of the use of multimodal techniques in developing adaptive learning systems designed for students with special needs, using various neural network models: a Baseline Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Network, Attention Model, LSTM, GRU, and Transformer models. Adaptive learning systems play a major role in the customization of the educational process in such a way as to ensure the specific cognitive, behavioural and emotional needs of students with special educational needs are catered for. The models were trained using a sizeable amount of multimodal data that recorded factors such as academic achievement, behavioral interactions, and environmental factors. From our observations, it can be noted that transformer models and attention mechanisms allowed for higher performance in predicting and fulfilling the needs of students, and were more effective than simpler neural architectures. These findings suggest that more advanced and intelligent neural networks can improve how students with different learning abilities consume content and consequently provide better educational answers and solutions to the market. To identify the important features affecting student performance, various Explainable AI (XAI) techniques were utilized, including SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) values, logistic regression-based feature importance analysis, LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations), partial dependency plots, and whose global surrogate model was a Decision Tree Regressor. These XAI instruments allowed the model’s decision to be explained and visualized so that teachers could understand the main beneficiaries of improved educational results. Such XAI methods enable transparency in how the models make decisions, thus allowing educators to understand the reasons for certain recommended learning paths.