## 4 Conceptual Design of BESPECIAL
### Second Development Stage
#### 4.2.1 Psychometric Tests and Their Delivery via VR  
As previously mentioned, a new input from dyslexic students will be collected in the final version of BESPECIALBESPECIAL, that is, the information coming from a battery of psychometric tests. The introduction of psychometric tests has been deemed necessary in order to have also an objective initial profile of the users, allowing comparison of different people in a unitary manner. In addition, the tests will enable the progress of dyslexic students to be tracked by monitoring the obtained scores over time. It is worth noting that not only learning performance, but also psychological aspects related to the learning process, such as anxiety, self-esteem, self-efficacy, strategies and motivations for studying will be assessed. Psychometric tests will be divided into five batteries. The first one is the previously mentioned BDA. It is targeted at 16 to 30 years old dyslexics and consists of 11 unpublished tests that evaluate three kinds of skills, namely, reading, writing and texts comprehension. In particular, BDA investigates the flexibility of the process of reading aloud and in silent mode, providing specific tasks to assess the degree of automation when writing and introduces a culture free, multiple choice answer-free reading comprehension trial. Its results allow the creation of detailed operating profiles of the assessed skills. The second battery is the State-Anxiety Inventory (STAI-Y), devised in the middle of the 1960s and revised in the early 1980s [81]. It is split into two scales (Y1 and Y2), which evaluate state anxiety and trait anxiety, respectively. The assessment of the former is performed through questions related to how the subject feels at the time of administering the questionnaire, whereas the assessment of the latter relies on questions that investigate how the subject feels habitually. For the purpose of BESPECIAL, only Y1 will be performed. The third battery measures the General Self-Efficacy Scale [82] and consists of 10 items aimed at explaining various cognitive and motivational aspects related to learning, including the impact of positive experiences and successes, perseverance in commitment, optimism and the development of interests in specific cultural and professional fields. The fourth battery is the Questionnaire on Learning Processes [83], in the D version (QPA-D), which is the one targeted at university students. It uses three scales that investigate the following aspects. 1. Intrinsic motivation for learning (MI), in which those who are engaged in learning regularly perform their school duties and progress harmoniously in all disciplines obtain high scores. 2. Metacognition and self-regulated learning (MA), in which those who are aware of their cognitive processes and, hence, manage their learning process effectively obtain high scores. 3. Learning strategies (SA), in which those that are capable to adopt good and effective strategies to process contents and information obtain high scores. The fifth battery is the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (R-SES) [84], which is aimed at measuring self-esteem and consists of 10 items related to overall feelings of self-worth or self-acceptance. The items are answered on a four-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. An intrinsic problem of the introduced psychometric tests lies in their format, which tends to be too formal and repetitive. Moreover, such tests require a lot of time to be completed. This causes people to get bored easily and, thus, to lose concentration and perform them without commitment. This issue is even more severe for dyslexics, whose problems affect exactly concentration and understanding. To overcome this, psychometric tests will be delivered by relying on VR. Its characteristics, indeed, allow recreating an interactive environment with high fidelity, thus presenting any material in a playful and appealing way, which is likely to improve engagement and attention [38].