Neurodiverse Children Learning Needs Assessment for Digital Inclusion in Mainstream Education

Imperatives of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are pushing the margins of children’s educational outcomes and inclusion for neurodevelopmental conditions in mainstream education, gaining traction in modern curriculum reforms. However, the paucity of empirical evidence about children’s diversity and digital competencies for lifelong learning adversely impacts gender equity and social inclusion in African post-pandemic education. Therefore, we examined early childhood teachers’ didactic practices and digital integration for neurodiverse assessment in Ghana’s standards-based education system. A school-based participatory research design was employed with a randomised sampling approach involving 1,307 pupils and 102 teachers from private and public schools. Using an observation protocol with a Likert-type scale, a test of the variance assumption for Kruskal–Wallis and descriptive statistical procedures were explored in the IBM-SPSS package version 23. The results showed children’s digital ecosystem comprising 61% of teachers’ 3-G mobile devices and personal laptops, and 30% computer laboratories with mainstream classrooms accommodating 11 neurodevelopmental disorders, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, autism, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Also, teachers’ tenure had no statistically significant impact on inclusive didactics using educational technology tools to support neurodiverse children’s learning outcomes. Based on our Monte Carlo simulation of significance, the study concluded that early-grade facilitators lack application of digital resources that support children’s creative learning needs and low teacher TPACK didactics in post-pandemic early-grade classrooms. Implications for deepening children’s global learning crisis occasioned by COVID-19 and other contextual factors in marginalised schools are discussed for edtech product design and deep learning for inclusive education from learning scientists’ perspectives.