SIG 15 meeting 2010 - Preliminary Programme
Transkript
SIG 15 meeting 2010 - Preliminary Programme
Biennial Meeting of EARLI SIG 15 Special Educational Needs Conference Theme Learning, Teaching and Diversity Preliminary Conference Programme September 6 - 7, 2010 Frankfurt am Main, Germany 1 Dear colleagues, We are very pleased to invite you to participate in the Biennial Meeting of EARLI SIG 15 Special Educational Needs taking place at the University of Frankfurt/Main (Germany) from Monday, September 6 until Tuesday, September 7, 2010. SIG 15 brings together researchers from across the globe who are involved in the study of Special Educational Needs at all levels (classroom, school and system), from first-graders to adults, for the purpose of meeting these challenges. Among its objectives, SIG 15 includes research to improve our understanding of the unique character of special educational needs as well as to improve learning and instruction in a range of settings: the classroom, the home, hospitals, institutions, wherever special education is available. In accordance with these objectives Learning, Teaching and Diversity was elected as general theme of the conference. The biennial meetings offer a forum for the exchange of findings in fundamental and applied research on special educational needs. The meeting aims at extending our understanding of causes and conditions of all kinds of special educational needs, advancing our knowledge on successful prevention and intervention procedures as well as broadening our scientific networks. The meeting will include 3 symposia, 9 paper sessions, 2 poster sessions, 2 keynote speeches and a debate. We would like to present this preliminary programme to you so that you can plan your conference visit. You will get the final conference programme (including room numbers and other useful information) with the conference materials at our registration desk. As SIG coordinators and organisers of the biennial SIG 15 meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, we would like to offer our hospitality to participants from all over the world. We hope the meeting will be an exciting and enriching scientific, personal, and social experience for all participants. We are looking forward to meeting you in Frankfurt in September 2010! Gerhard Buettner Adina Shamir Sebastian Poloczek SIG Coordinator University of Frankfurt SIG Coordinator Bar-Ilan University Jure Assistant Coordinator University of Frankfurt 2 Time 08:00 - 08:30 Monday, 6 Sept Registration Tuesday, 7 Sept Registration 08:30 - 09.00 09:00 - 09:30 09:30 - 10:00 Welcome Symposium 3 Paper Session 8 & 9 Keynote 1 10:00 - 10:30 10:30 - 11:00 Coffee / Tea 11:00 - 11:30 11:30 - 12:00 12:00 - 12:30 Keynote 2 Symposium 1 Paper Session 1 & 2 Lunch 12:30 - 13:00 13:00 - 13:30 Lunch 13:30 - 14:00 Poster Session A&B 14:00 - 14:30 14:30 - 15:00 15:00 - 15:30 Coffee / Tea Symposium 2 Paper Session 3 & 4 Debate Coffee / Tea Coffee / Tea 15:30 - 16:00 16:00 - 16:30 16:30 - 17:00 17:00 - 17:30 Paper Session 5 – 7 17:30 - 18:00 18:00 - 18:30 18:30 - 19:00 19:00 - 19:30 SIG Meeting 19:30 - 20:00 20:00 - 20:30 20:30 - 21:00 Social Event (Dinner) 21:00 - 21:30 3 Keynote 1 Karin Landerl Associations and Dissociations between Deficits in Reading, Spelling, and Arithmetic Monday 09:30h-10:30h In order to fully specify the complex profiles of risk and protective factors of learning disorders, we need to better understand the conditions under which they co-occur as well as the conditions under which they dissociate. In a recent epidemiological study with a large sample (N = 2586) of German speaking primary school children, the rates of deficits in reading, spelling, and/or arithmetic were four to five times higher in children already experiencing marked problems in one academic domain. Still, detailed comparisons of specifically selected subgroups of children with isolated versus comorbid learning disorders suggest that each disorder is associated with a characteristic cognitive profile. Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling problems is best explained by deficits in the fast access from visual symbols to phonological representations (indicated by a marked deficit in rapid automatized naming). Children with isolated spelling deficits (but adequate reading performance) are characterised by deficits in phonological awareness which probably hamper the amalgamation of phonological and orthographic information. Isolated deficits in arithmetic development are typically associated with a specific impairment in understanding, processing, and manipulating numerical magnitudes. Comorbid learning disorders seem to be largely additive from the cognitive profiles associated with each disorder. Symposium 1 New Technologies for Enhancing SEN Students' Performance in School and Daily Life Organized by Adina Shamir Monday 11:00h-13:00h Orit Hetzroni & Juman Tannous Evaluation VR vs. CAI as teaching strategies among students with ASD: A metaanalysis Sarah Parsons & Sara Garib-Penna Perspective taking and collaboration in multi-user Virtual Environments by young people on the autism spectrum: a preliminary study Sigal Eden The effect of using laptops on the spelling capabilities of students in special education classes Adina Shamir & Inessa Shlafer The effect of activity with e-book on vocabulary and story comprehension among kindergarteners at risk for LD as opposed to typically developing children 4 Paper Session 1 Inclusion and Professional Development Monday 11:00h-13:00h Joel Santos & Margarida César: Inclusion and professional Development: Concerns, attitudes and sentiments Marina Santi & Elisabetta Ghedin: Index for commitment to inclusion Lio Moscardini: “It’s to do with the teaching”: Developing an inclusive pedagogy through teacher professional development in children’s mathematical thinking. Maria Kypriotaki & George Manolitsis Modification of typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes towards children with special educational needs through story-reading and film-viewing Paper Session 2 Language Impairments and Sign Language Tests Monday 11:00h-13:00h Lucy A. Henry, David Messer & Gilly Nash Educational implications of deficits in executive functioning for children with specific language impairment Melanie Eberhardt, Christoph Michael Müller & Susanne Nußbeck Language comprehension in autism – The explanatory power of theory of weak central coherence and its implications for learning and instruction Wolfgang Mann & Chloe Marshall Measuring deaf children’s vocabulary knowledge in British sign language Tobias Haug Testing sign language development in deaf and hard-of-hearing children: The case of the German Sign Language Receptive Skills Test 5 Symposium 2 The Quality of Experience of Children with Special Educational Needs and Teachers in Inclusive Schools Organized by Martin Venetz Monday 14:00h-16:00h Martin Venetz Introduction to the basic concept of quality of experience and its measurement Rupert Tarnutzer The quality of experience of children with special educational needs in inclusive and special classes Mireille Audeoud & Emanuela Wertli The experience of daily life of hard of hearing children Carmen Zurbriggen The quality of cooperation experienced by remedial and regular teachers in inclusive schools Matthias Grünke Critical Synopsis Paper Session 3 Preschool Intervention Studies and Improving Reading Monday 14:00h-16:00h Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber & Tamara Fischmann The evaluation of two prevention programs in day-care centers (EVA) Andrea Lanfranchi Long-term effects of early child care on the success of immigrant children at Swiss schools Telse Nagler, Marcus Hasselhorn & Sven Lindberg Accelerating the reading and calculating process in German elementary school children: An investigation of the acceleration phenomenon’s transferability Inmaculada Fajardo, Vicenta Avila, Gema Tavares & Antonio Ferrer Easy to read text for students with intellectual disability 6 Paper Session 4 Emotion and Motivation Monday 14:00h-16:00h Greta Pelgrims The role of special education teaching practices into learning disabled students’ motivational and emotional self-regulation Chantal S. Rietz, Wolfgang Woerner & Andju Sara Labuhn Dyslexia and co-occurring emotional and behavioral problems after controlling for ADHD Jürgen Wilbert & Matthias Grünke The effect of activating the identity of being learning disabled on cognitive test performance Greta Pelgrims Learning disabled students’ task commitment, persistence, and performances in mathematics: A matter of general motivational components or situated motivational processes? 7 Paper Session 5 Children with Learning Disabilities in Mathematics Monday 16:30h-18:00h Claudia Mähler & Kirsten Schuchardt Working memory, basic arithmetics and numerical competencies in subgroups of children with mathematical disabilities Daniel Sinner & Jan Kuhl Differential effects of a mathematical training of first-graders in elementary schools and special schools Elisabeth Moser Opitz, Okka Freesemann, Ina Matull, Susanne Prediger & Stephan Hußmann Fostering children with learning disabilities in mathematics in secondary school Paper Session 6 Memory in People with Learning Difficulties Monday 16:30h-18:00h Sebastian Poloczek, Gerhard Büttner & Marcus Hasselhorn The phonological short-term memory of children with intellectual disabilities: Are their redintegration processes less efficient? Michael Grosche & Matthias Grünke Impact of deficits in phonological processing on functionally illiterate adults Nadine Malstädt, Martin Lehmann & Marcus Hasselhorn Rehearsal strategies in children with dyslexia Paper Session 7 Special Needs of Adolescents and Adults Monday 16:30h-18:00h Amos Fleischmann & Erez C. Miller Stories of adults with ADHD in the web: A grounded theory study Kurt Haefeli & Claudia Hofmann Youth at risk? Employment perspectives and job careers of young people after a two-year basic training course with Swiss Basic Federal VET Certificate Alexander Wettstein Aggression in environments of adolescent boys and girls: Four single case studies with camera—glasses 8 Symposium 3 Cognitive Correlates of Mathematics Learning Difficulties Organized by Evelyn H. Kroesbergen Tuesday 08:30h-10:30h Liane Kaufmann, Thomas Scherndl, Guilherme Wood, Korbinian Moeller, HansChristoph Nuerk & Silvia Pixner Domain-general and domain-specific abilities as predictors of complex arithmetic skills Maria Chiara Passolunghi Cognitive and Emotional factors in children with developmental disorders in arithmetic ability Carmen Brankaer, Pol Ghesquière & Bert De Smedt Symbolic and nonsymbolic number sense in children with mild intellectual disabilities Sylke W. M. Toll, Sanne H. G. Van der Ven, Evelyn H. Kroesbergen & Johannes E. H.Van Luit Executive Functions and Number Sense as Predictors of Math Learning Disabilities Paper Session 8 Inclusion Tuesday 08:30h-10:30h Margarida César & Ricardo Machado Finding a voice in mathematics classes: Students’ inclusion process Joaquim Melro & Margarida César Learning and teaching within diversity: A case study about Deaf students’ inclusion in a regular secondary school Inês Borges & Margarida César You talk, I see, we learn: Two Deaf students in a mathematics mainstream class Cláudia Ventura, Margarida César & Nuno Santos Participating in mathematics classes: Blind students experiences of inclusion 9 Paper Session 9 New Measurement Instruments and Dynamic Assessment Tuesday 08:30h-10:30h Jan-Henning Ehm, Telse Nagler, Marcus Hasselhorn & Sven Lindberg Assessing the academic self-concept in German elementary school children: How to identify children at risk? Alexander Wettstein The observation-system for the analysis of aggressive behaviour in classroomsettings BASYS Marco G.P. Hessels, Katia Vanderlinden & Hildalill Rojas Training effects in dynamic assessment: eye movement as indicator of problem solving behavior Floor van Loo & G.M. van der Aalsvoort Interaction patterns leading to learning gains: How to measure and how to interpret? Keynote 2 Annemie Desoete Dyscalculia: Can Metacognition make the Difference? Tuesday 11:00h-12:00h Most researchers currently report a prevalence of dyscalculia (DC) between 3-14% of children. Five studies on the relationship between metacognition and DC will be presented. In the first study the metacognitive profile of children with DC was found not comparable on all aspects to the profile of other younger children. In addition ½ of the children with procedural DC and 5% of the children with semantic memory deficits had less developed metacognitive skills. Furthermore the inhibition and working memory skills of children with DC were compared to those of age-matched peers without learning disabilities. In addition, thematic analyses on adults with DC revealed that many of them still had problems with planning and keeping track of steps and that supporting surroundings were important protective factors towards the chances of success. Finally metacognition was found to be modifiable with value added to mathematical problem solving. Therefore since several (but not all) average intelligent children with DC were found to show inaccurate metacognitive skills, it may be advisable to assess these skills and focus on these skills if less developed. These studies suggest that there is a spectrum of DC with different metacognitive problems and strengths in young children. 10 Tuesday 13:30h-14:30h Poster Session A Ana Isabel Alves Silva & Helena Framrose Bilimória Cooperative practices and cognitive training: An approach to improve memory and attention in retarded students Jasmin Warwas, Katja Adl-Amini, Gerhard Büttner, Sanna-K. Djakovic, Benjamin Fauth, Ilonca Hardy, Silke Hertel, Lena Hondrich, Eckhard Klieme, Mareike Kunter, Arnim Lühken, Susanne Mannel & Alexander Naumann Project IGEL (Individual Development and Adaptive Learning Environments in Primary School) Catherine Plutecka Effectiveness of various communicating methods used by deaf students with additional developmental dysfunctions Anton J.H. Boonen, Meijke E Kolkman & Evelyn H. Kroesbergen Teacher related aspects influencing the acquisition of number sense within kindergarten classrooms Tuesday 13:30h-14:30h Poster Session B Maria - Efterpi Frangogianni The emotional development of children with dyslexia Johannes Gross, Katharina Hohn, Siebel Telli, Renate Rasch & Wolfgang Schnotz Differences in the spontaneous use of various representations and further elements of the problem solving process on complex story problems, comparing students from two class levels and different ability groups Matthias Grünke & Jürgen Wilbert Teaching critical thinking skills to future special educators Maria Kypriotaki, Maria Markodimitraki, Maria Ampartzaki & Michalis Linardakis The interaction of twin autistic brothers with teachers and peers in a Special Nursery Unit: A case study Anna Wójcik Family and school environments in the context of work with an ADHD child 11 Debate Joe Elliott Does Dyslexia Exist? Tuesday 14:30h-16:00h Discussants: Annemie Desoete, Marcus Hasselhorn & Karin Landerl In his presentation, Joe Elliot will argue that attempts to distinguish between categories of ‘dyslexia’ and ‘poor reader’ or ‘reading disabled’ are scientifically unsupportable, arbitrary and thus potentially discriminatory. In putting forward this position, he does not seek to veto scientific curiosity in examining underlying factors in reading disability, for seeking greater understanding of the relationship between visual symbols and spoken language is crucial. However, while stressing the potential of genetics and neuroscience for guiding assessment and educational practice at some stage in the future, he will argue that there is a mistaken belief that current knowledge in these fields is sufficient to justify a category of dyslexia as a subset of those who encounter reading difficulties. The implications of this debate for large-scale intervention will be outlined. Subsequent to the presentation Annemie Desoete, Marcus Hasselhorn and Karin Landerl will discuss the issues raised by Joe Elliott. 12 Symposia 13 Symposium 1: New technologies for enhancing SEN students' performance in school and daily life. Adina Shamir Bar- Ilan University Shamira@mail.biu.ac.il Computer-assisted learning and other new technologies that have been shown to enhance performance in numerous academic areas (e.g., Goodwin, 2008; Hetzroni & Shrieber, 2004; Snyder, 2002; Valmont, 2000) hold great promise for helping promote the inclusion of SEN individuals into modern society. The literature indicates that computerized environments, because they are characterized by multiple representations of knowledge, may support the instruction of SEN students faced with barriers that make learning a more complex process. The use of multiple representations of knowledge in SEN instruction rests on the idea that this approach facilitates learning by providing several mutually referenced sources of information, each of which compensates for a different aspect of the individual's specific needs (Mayer, 2003). In addition, computerized environments (multimedia software, virtual reality (VR), etc.) may offer SEN individuals a range of opportunities to practice participation in everyday life by simulating activities in a motivating and adaptable yet neutral environment. Yet, despite the multiplicity of new approaches and applications now available, construction of the knowledge and databases needed to assess their significance with respect to students’ characteristics, teaching goals and software design still await expansion. In attempting to meet this challenge, the proposed symposium will focus on the potential contributions of new technologies to the performance of SEN students in school and in everyday environments. New Technologies – Performance – SEN students 14 Evaluation VR vs. CAI as teaching strategies among students with ASD: A meta-analysis Orit Hetzroni & Juman Tannous University of Haifa, Israel hetzroni@construct.haifa.ac.il Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) demonstrate severe behavioral, communicative, social, and cognitive deficits. Such deficits interfere with the process of learning new skills and generalizing these skills beyond the learning setting. Over the years, an overwhelming number of intervention strategies and treatment methods were developed in order to increase the efficacy of the learning process. Of these, the use of assistive technology (AT) as part of the intervention strategy has become prevalent for teaching children with ASD In this study a meta-analysis was performed, in order to determine what makes an intervention strategy successful among students with autism. This meta-analysis reviewed technology based intervention studies (virtual reality and computer based) searching for basic efficient common factors, contributing to successful learning and generalization. Results revealed that all components of practice were found both in CAI and VR intervention strategies used for teaching individuals with autism. Data and model will be presented. 15 Perspective taking and collaboration in multi-user Virtual Environments by young people on the autism spectrum: a preliminary study Sarah Parsons & Sara Garib-Penna University of Birmingham, School of Education s.j.parsons@bham.ac.uk The ability to understand and interpret the perspectives of others is a wellestablished core difficulty for people on the autism spectrum. This preliminary study from the European FP7 project COSPATIAL, aims to investigate the potential of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) for supporting children’s understanding of others’ perspectives. One of the unique affordances of CVEs is the ability to adopt different viewpoints within a task by two or more participants. Our ‘Block Party’ task utilises this affordance to encourage children to work together to achieve a shared goal; to do this they need to understand that the other person’s perspective is different to their own and communicate effectively with their partner about which block they need to choose. The study is currently being conducted and will implement a pilot version of ‘Block Party’ with approximately 6 higher-functioning young people on the autism spectrum and 6 typically developing peers aged 8-14 years. Performance on the task will be videotaped and analysed for quality and nature of communication and collaboration to see whether children are able to work together effectively on the task by taking the other player’s perspective into account. Background measures of language and general cognitive ability will be taken and the Social Communication Questionnaire administered to parents of the children with autism. The results of the study will inform the project about the acceptability and usability of the task within the CVE as well as ability levels of the children required for successful completion. The study will also inform us about where and how children’s understanding requires scaffolding within the game, either through the facilitation of computer-assisted mediation by a virtual character (‘Professor Blocks’) or via a human mediator (teacher). Results and their implications will be presented and discussed at this conference. Autism, Virtual Reality, Collaboration 16 The effect of using laptops on the spelling capabilities of students in special education classes Sigal Eden Bar- Ilan University, Israel sigaled@openu.ac.il The current study examined the effect of using laptops on the spelling capabilities of students in special education classes. The study was conducted as part of the Katom Project (The Davidson Institute for Scientific Education). Ninety three students with learning disabilities participated in this study aged 13-16, who study in 10 special education classes in 5 junior high schools. The participants were randomly divided into 2 groups; the experimental group, which was using the laptops, included 54 students (46 males, 8 females). The control group, which did not use laptops, included 39 students from (17 males, 22 females). A spelling test was administered to all participants at a pre-intervention stage and again at a post-stage. Based on existing academic literature, we asked two research questions: 1) Do the results for the experimental group would show significant differences in the amount of spelling mistakes between the two spelling tests (pre/post)? 2) Will differences be found between the two research groups in regards to the gaps between the tests results? The findings indicated that the participants in the experimental group significantly improved their spelling capabilities as opposed to the control group while the participants in the control group didn't. The findings will be discussed in light of previous findings. It seems that the usage of laptops in special education classes can enhance the spelling capabilities of students with learning disabilities. 17 The effect of activity with e-book on vocabulary and story comprehension among kindergarteners at risk for LD as opposed to typically developing children Adina Shamir & Inessa Shlafer Bar- Ilan University, Israel Shamira@mail.biu.ac.il The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of e-book activity for vocabulary acquisition and story comprehension among kindergarteners at risk for LD as opposed to typically developing children. Participants included 136 children aged 5-7 (M=71.2; SD=5.64, in months), 75 at risk for learning disabilities and 60 typically developing children. The children in each group were then randomly assigned to either the e-book intervention or the control group, which experienced the regular kindergarten program, a total of four groups. The findings indicated significant improvement in vocabulary among both groups exposed to the e-book intervention, especially among children at risk for LD. Conversely, story comprehension among typically developing children was higher than among children at risk for LD following the e-book reading. These findings and their implications will be discussed. 18 Symposium 2: The quality of experience of children with special educational needs and teachers in inclusive schools Martin Venetz University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education Zurich martin.venetz@hfh.ch Momentary affective states like emotions or mood states are related to motivational and cognitive processes and influence conjointly human behaviour. There are numerous studies which investigated within school settings the effects of negative affective states (e. g., test anxiety) on learning. As recent studies show, positive affective states should equally be taken into consideration because they have an important influence on learning motivation, formation of interests, and academic achievement. However, these findings can be criticized because the quality of experience has typically not been studied in situ, i. e. in the context of everyday life. In addition, there are no empirical findings on how children with special educational needs experience their schooling in regular classes. A relatively new group of data collection techniques known as «Experience Sampling Method» (ESM) or «Ecological Momentary Assessment» enables the momentary capture of real-world data and offers a new approach to different types of research questions. In this symposium three empirical studies using the ESM technique will be presented. They all capture school life as it is lived, and in particular, focus on the affective states of pupils with special educational needs and teachers in regular classes. The first study contrasts the quality of experience of pupils with special educational needs in regular schools with their classmates as well with children in special schools. The second study compares children with hearing impairments and their hearing classmates with respect to their experiencing everyday life in general and schooling in particular. The third study addresses regular and remedial teachers, and deals with the question of how these teachers experience their cooperation. The symposium will start with an introductory contribution in which the common conceptual and methodological background of the three studies will be exposed. The symposium will close with a critical synopsis by Prof. Dr. Grünke (University of Cologne). 19 Introduction to the basic concept of quality of experience and its measurement Martin Venetz University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education Zurich martin.venetz@hfh.ch In the centre of the three empirical studies presented in this symposium is the quality of everyday life as it is experienced by children with special educational needs in inclusive schools on the one hand and their teachers on the other. Therefore, the aim of the first symposium's presentation is to introduce to the concept and measurement of the quality of experience of everyday life. Three features are characteristic for this concept: current affective states, internal experiences and ecological validity. Momentary affective states are related to motivational and cognitive processes and influence conjointly human behaviour. From this point of view the experience of positive affective states is of particular importance for children with special educational needs in inclusive classes because compared to their classmates, these children are in many respects at a disadvantage. In order to get as close as possible to the transient momentary states in the natural context, a new data collection technique, the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), was developed. The basic idea of this method is to capture a representative sample of «emotional snapshots» from everyday life as experienced by the study participants. The main advantage of the Experience Sampling Method is the systematic collection of the current, cognitive little processed affective experience in the natural life context. Quality of Experience – Everyday Life – Special Educational Needs 20 The quality of experience of children with special educational needs in inclusive and special classes Rupert Tarnutzer University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education Zurich rupert.tarnutzer@hfh.ch As a result of recent school development in the German speaking part of Switzerland, inclusive classes have been introduced, with the aim to support as many students as possible in terms of their learning and behavioural development. It is the project’s intention to survey the quality of experience (affective and motivational experiences, as states) as well as the motivational attitude (traits) of students with behavioural or learning problems in inclusive classes. A second intention is to compare their self-report measures with students without special needs and with students in special classes. The quality of experience is described with the circumplex model of affect and the flow concept. Trait measures of self described motivational attitudes where described with the reference norm orientation, the goal orientation and the dimensions of integration. The sample consists of 6th-grade-students (712 students from 40 inclusive classes; and 102 students from 22 special classes). The experience sampling method was applied to survey the quality of experience at 14 randomly chosen learning situations over the period of one week. Central findings are (1) that students with behavioural or learning problems in inclusive classes differ from students without special needs in different relevant aspects of their motivational attitude, but lesser in their quality of experience. (2) They have a comparatively low, but realistic academic self-concept. (3) Inclusive schooling brings, particularly to students with behavioural problems, a somewhat higher amount of stress. The difference to students without special needs and to students in special classes is considerable. (4) Students with learning problems describe themselves as more motivated and content. (5) Students with behavioural and learning problems in inclusive classes describe themselves as socially better integrated compared to students in special classes. Quality of Experience – Special Educational Needs – Schooling 21 The experience of daily life of hard of hearing children Mireille Audeoud & Emanuela Wertli University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education Zurich mireille.audeoud@hfh.ch Since almost 50 years, hard of hearing children are taught in regular classes in Switzerland. Well established assistance by specialist support for hard of hearing students (Audiopädagogen) is given. These children school achievement seems to be equal to their hearing peers. However it is assumed, that the hard of hearing children still provide a great amount of additional work and expense. Daily (school) life is based communication in different surroundings, in which especially hard of hearing children are experiencing obstacles, which they have to overcome with extra effort. The question rises: How do they experience then their daily life? This section focuses on the capturing of subjective experiences in different situational contexts of hard of hearing children (age 11-13 years) in comparison to hearing classmates. The present empirical research project shows the experiences of 78 hard of hearing children and 78 hearing peers during 7 days; they were asked 5 times a day with Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to describe their actual positive and negative activation, their flow, concentration and their stress in different activities (at school or in leisure time; learning, discussing, hanging around, eating, watching TV, etc.), in different social and physical contexts (outside or inside, school, at home, in noisy surroundings, activities alone or in a group, etc.). Multilevel analyses show how hearing impairment influence daily experience, how much variance lies within the impairment, the situational contexts or personality characteristics of the children. Experience Sampling Method – Hard of Hearing Children – Quality of Experience 22 The quality of cooperation experienced by remedial and regular teachers in inclusive schools Carmen Zurbriggen University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education Zurich carmen.zurbriggen@hfh.ch In order to guarantee participation of pupils with special educational needs in inclusive schools, the collaboration of remedial and regular teachers is crucial. Nevertheless a culture of collaboration between teachers is hardly established in Switzerland. Empirical studies show that teachers perceive such a collaboration both as helpful as well as difficult. However, there is little known about how teachers experience instruction-centered teamwork in various situations of everyday school life. The objective of this study was twofold: (1) to explore how teaching in general and cooperation in particular – compared with overall workaday life – are experienced proximately, and (2) to determine personal and situational factors which influence the quality of experience of an activity. Using the experience sampling method, 19 teachers provided information about their affective states and experiences on 783 moments in their everyday life. The results show that – in comparison to the individual average of the quality of experience – teaching on the whole and situations of instruction-centered teamwork are accompanied by high positive activation. Yet, the quality of experience of remedial teachers differs in various settings significantly from those of regular teachers. Worth mentioning is that cooperative teaching in the same classroom has positive motivational effects –for collaborating remedial as well as regular teachers. Quality of Experience – Cooperation – Teachers in Inclusive Schools 23 Symposium 3: Cognitive correlates of mathematics learning difficulties Evelyn H. Kroesbergen Utrecht University, Langeveld Institute e.h.kroesbergen@uu.nl Mathematical abilities are crucial for everyday life and represent an important part of the curriculum in elementary education. Still, many children have difficulties with learning math. Previous research has shown that two important underlying factors of math are working memory (or executive functions) and number sense. However, only a few studies have investigated the interlinked relations between these factors in mathematical development. In this symposium, four studies will be presented that studied the role of working memory and number sense in relation to children with difficulties in learning math. In three of the four presented studies (1,2,4), the role of domain-general abilities in math learning difficulties is studied longitudinally (firstthird grade). The studied domain-general abilities include verbal and visuo-spatial working memory and short term memory, inhibition, and processing speed. Papers 1,3 and 4 also focus on the influence of domain-specific abilities, including numerical magnitude comparison, number line estimation, counting, and basic number skills. The studies show a significant role of both domain-specific abilities and working memory in the development of mathematics. The main question addressed in the symposium deals with the importance of domain-specific vs. domain-general factors in the development of difficulties in mathematics. Discussing the results of these studies will enlarge our insight in the development of children’s math skills in general, and in the development of mathematical difficulties in particular. 24 Domain-general and domain-specific abilities as predictors of complex arithmetic skills 1 2 2 Liane Kaufmann , Thomas Scherndl , Guilherme Wood , Korbinian 3 3 1 Moeller , Hans-Christoph Nuerk & Silvia Pixner 1 UMIT University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Division of Psychology 2 University of Salzburg, Department of Psychology 3 University of Tuebingen, Department of Psychology liane.kaufmann@umit.at Currently, the link between complex arithmetic performance and potential precursor skills is poorly understood. Longitudinal studies investigating this interlink are scarce and respective studies either focus on the influence of domain-general cognitive abilities (e.g. working memory) or domain-specific abilities (e.g., basic number skills). The present study fills this gap: We report longitudinal data from 128 (67 male) Austrian children. By employing structural equation modeling we sought to disentangle potential differential predictive values of domain-general and domain-specific abilities (in first grade) on complex arithmetic skills (in third grade). The first study aim was to assess the construct validity of the constructs “basic numerical abilities” and “complex arithmetic skills”. Secondly, path analyses were conducted to create a model incorporating domain-general (nonverbal intelligence, working memory components such as letter/Corsi span forward/backward) as well as domain-specific abilities (number comparison, number scale, transcoding) as predictors of arithmetic performance (two-digit addition, subtraction and multiplication). Results revealed that the constructs of basic numerical abilities and complex arithmetic skills are meaningful and best represented as second-order models. Path analyses disclosed two models with high overall fit (CFI>.97). In the first model, direct paths between domain-general and domain-specific abilities and complex arithmetic skills were calculated, while in the second model domain-general abilities were modeled to indirectly influence arithmetic skills over domain-specific skills. Findings showed that arithmetic skills in third grade are strongly predicted by previous arithmetic achievement and basic numerical abilities but not by domaingeneral abilities in first grade. Finally, domain-general abilities were found to influence domain-specific abilities. Overall, compared with domain-general abilities domain-specific abilities (requiring the processing and manipulation of numerical magnitudes) are generally better predictors of later arithmetic skills. However, importantly, findings disclosed that (basic) number processing is not independent from domain-general abilities, thus implying a close interplay between domaingeneral and domain-specific abilities throughout development. Longitudinal Study – Domain-general and Domain-specific Skills – Structural Equation Model 25 Cognitive and Emotional factors in children with developmental disorders in arithmetic ability Maria Chiara Passolunghi University of Trieste, Faculty of Psychology passolu@units.it Emotional and cognitive factors were examined in 18 children with specific developmental disorders in arithmetic ability (AD), compared with 18 normally achieving children, matched for chronological age and school level, and vocabulary. Working memory, short-term memory, inhibitory processes, speed of processing and level of anxiety in mathematics were assessed in the two groups. The results corroborated the hypothesis that children with AD are impaired in working memory capacity, inhibitory ability, and speed of processing. However, no impairment was found in short-term memory tasks requiring passive storage of verbal or numerical information. Moreover, while children with AD showed higher levels of anxiety in mathematics, their levels in other school subjects were similar to those of normal achievers. Implications for identifying underlying emotional and cognitive deficits in children with AD are discussed, along with possible approaches for treatment. Arithmetic Disorder – Working Memory – Math Anxiety 26 Symbolic and nonsymbolic number sense in children with mild intellectual disabilities Carmen Brankaer, Pol Ghesquière & Bert De Smedt Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Carmen.Brankaer@ped.kuleuven.be Mathematical abilities are crucial for everyday life and represent an important part of the curriculum in primary school. Individuals with mild intellectual disabilities appear to have difficulties with the development of these mathematical abilities. Understanding the nature of these difficulties is crucial to design appropriate interventions. Number sense or the ability to represent numerical magnitudes has been put forward as a crucial correlate of children’s mathematical development. The present study therefore aimed to investigate this cognitive factor in children with mild intellectual disabilities. We investigated whether children with mild intellectual disabilities have difficulties in the ability to represent numerical magnitudes and/or difficulties in the ability to access numerical magnitudes from formal symbols. Twenty-four children with mild intellectual disabilities completed a symbolic (numbers) and a non-symbolic (dot arrays) numerical magnitude comparison task. We compared their performance on these tasks with two control groups of typically developing children: one control group (n = 30) matched on chronological age (CA) and one control group (n = 30) matched on mathematical ability (MA). Children with mild intellectual disabilities performed more poorly than the CA-control group on both the symbolic and the nonsymbolic comparison task. However, children with mild intellectual disabilities did not differ from the MA-control group on both tasks. These findings suggest that the development of magnitude representation of children with mild intellectual disabilities is marked by a delay in representing magnitudes and in accessing numerical magnitudes from symbolic digits. This indicates that intervention should foster both the development of magnitude representations and the connection between symbols and the magnitudes they represent. Number Sense – Mild Intellectual Disabilities – Mathematics 27 Executive Functions and Number Sense as Predictors of Math Learning Disabilities Sylke W. M. Toll, Sanne H. G. Van der Ven, Evelyn H. Kroesbergen & Johannes E. H.Van Luit Utrecht University S.W.M.Toll@uu.nl In the past years, an increasing number of studies investigated executive functions and preparatory mathematical abilities as predictors of individual differences in mathematical abilities. The present longitudinal study was designed to investigate whether the executive functions shifting, inhibition and updating can be seen as precursors of math learning disabilities in children, compared to preparatory mathematical abilities. Two classifications were made based on (persistent) mathematical ability in 1st through 2nd grade. Repeated measures analyses and discriminant analyses were used to investigate which functions predict most of the group classifications. The distinguished groups differed in their performance on several math tasks. The updating tasks were predictors for children at risk for math learning disabilities, even over and above the predictive value of preparatory mathematical abilities. Therefore, this research implicates the use of updating tasks at the beginning of first grade for identifying children at risk for persistent mathematical difficulties. Executive Functions – Number Sense – Mathematical Learning Disabilities 28 Paper Presentations (Abstracts in alphabetical order) 29 You talk, I see, we learn: Two Deaf students in a mathematics mainstream class 1 Inês Borges & Margarida César 2 1 Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Unidade de Investigação Educação e Desenvolvimento 2 Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação inesborges@hotmail.com Schools became significantly more multicultural over the last two decades (Abreu & Elbers, 2005; César, 2009) receiving students categorized as presenting Special Educational Needs (SEN), including Deaf students (Borges, 2009; Freire & César, 2002, 2003). Teachers face new challenges like (re)thinking the curriculum and adapting their practices to each student’s characteristics, needs and interests (César & Santos, 2006). They should also follow the inclusive education principals (UNESCO, 1994) and facilitate their access to academic achievement and the transitions between cultures (Zittoun, 2006) in order to avoid exclusion (César & Ainscow, 2006; Cobb & Hodge, 2007). Assuming an interpretative approach (Denzin, 2002) we focus on two Deaf students attending the 12th grade in a mainstream school. Each one of them constitutes an intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995). Besides them, we considered as participants their classmates, and their mathematics and special education teachers. The data collecting instruments was the observation (registered in the researcher's diary; some lessons were audio-taped), interviews, informal conversations, students' protocols and documents. The data treatment was based in a narrative content analysis (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998), from which inductive categories emerged (César, 2009; Hamido & César, 2009). Through the analysis of some episodes and diverse empirical evidence we address some adaptations made both by their mathematics teacher and classmates. These adaptations facilitated these two Deaf students’ mathematics learning and inclusion, helping them to become legitimate participants in these mathematics classes (César, 2009). Some excerpts illuminate different interactive patterns that emerged during mathematical activities. They befit the Deaf students’ characteristics and needs. They also facilitated the hearing students’ mathematics learning process and therefore they allowed these students to overcome some communication barriers and to become more included among their peers, in particular, and in the school community, in general. Deaf Students – Mathematics Performances – Inclusion 30 Finding a voice in mathematics classes: Students’ inclusion process 1 2 Margarida César & Ricardo Machado 1 Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação 2 Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Unidade de Investigação Educação e Desenvolvimento macesar@ie.ul.pt At a technological and literate society inclusion plays a main role allowing people to become critical and active citizens. School practices may promote - or create barriers - to students’ access to literacy. Thus different types of exclusion can be addressed and promoting inclusion is much more than merely allowing students in a Special Educational Needs (SEN) situation to attend a mainstream school (César & Ainscow, 2006). Nowadays most policy documents states that school should provide the means to develop each and every student’s competences, as assumed in the Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994). Collaborative work is also suggested in many of them. Social interactions, namely among peers, play a main role in the learning process (César, 2009). Over 12 years we developed the Interaction and Knowledge project in Portuguese classes (5th to 12th grades). Its main goal was to study and promote peer interactions as a facilitator for knowledge appropriation and the mobilisation/development of students’ competences. We assume a socio-critic approach and an action-research design. The participants were students, their mathematics teachers, psychologists, and significant others. The data was collected through participant observation; questionnaires, interviews, tasks inspired in projective techniques, an instrument to evaluate students’ abilities and competencies, students’ protocols, documents, and reports. Special attention was given to paradigmatic cases. We will address one of them related to a student categorised as presenting SEN and his inclusion process. The analysis of peer interactions excerpts illuminates their role in students’ performances, change of attitudes, socio-cognitive and emotional development and school achievement. Peer interactions are an effective way of avoiding students’ rejection of academic tasks. They contribute to the development of students’ positive academic self-esteem, their ability to find solving strategies and to become more autonomous and critical learners. They also play an essential role in order to promote inclusive schooling principles. Inclusive Education – Mathematics – Collaborative Work 31 Language comprehension in autism – The explanatory power of theory of weak central coherence and its implications for learning and instruction 1 2 Melanie Eberhardt , Christoph Michael Müller & Susanne Nußbeck 1 1 University of Cologne 2 University Fribourg / CH Melanie.eberhardt@gmx.net Speech and language processing in people with autism was examined in numerous studies over the past decades. Interestingly, compared to language production less attention has been directed to language comprehension, although it is a crucial prerequisite for successful learning. Further, the existing empirical results on this topic currently are almost only interpreted within a framework of autistic deficits in social cognition. At this point we examined in a theoretical approach, if the results on language comprehension could also be explained by theory of weak central coherence (Happé & Frith 2006). This account focuses on the informationprocessing of persons with autism and predicts a spontaneous bias towards details. Although the theory has been mostly studied with a focus on visual perception, it might also provide explanations for the specificities of language processing in autism. In order to examine the model’s explanatory power in the verbal-semantic domain, we arranged the pivotal findings on speech and language comprehension in autism along a linguistic model (Bishop 1999) and compared them to the assumptions of theory of weak central coherence. The results show that a detailfocused processing style can provide interesting explanations for the specific language comprehension abilities in autism. This new perspective offers implications for a better understanding of persons with autism and adequate arrangements for learning and instruction. Autism – Language Comprehension – Central Coherence 32 Assessing the academic self-concept in German elementary school children: How to identify children at risk? Jan-Henning Ehm, Telse Nagler, Marcus Hasselhorn & Sven Lindberg German Institute for International Educational Research ehm@dipf.de Abstract: A more positive, but also realistic self-concept is a pretty robust predictor of school achievement. Self-concept influences the willingness for learning and enhances the probability to make usage of adapted strategies for solving problems. Negative as well as unrealistic levels of self-concept are often accompanied with learning difficulties. Thus, the present study aims to develop a new scale in order to identify children with different self-concept pattern (over- and underestimation, realistic selfconcept). A sample of 300 third grade children was investigated (mean age 9; 3). Subjects’ academic self-concept was assessed using an 18 items questionnaire with seven stages. The stages were illustrated via small figures (ranging from “very poor” to “very good”). The childrens’ task was to label one of the stick figures, representing their own abilities regarding their own perceived reading, writing and math ability. Additionally, standardized reading (ELFE 1-6), writing (DERET 3-4+) and math school achievement tests (DEMAT 3+) were administered. Furthermore, non-verbal IQ was assessed by using the SPM-Plus measurement. The individual German and Math grades were provided by the teachers. The hypothesis of a reciprocal effect of self-concept and school performance (Helmke & van Aken, 1995), motivated our search to whether self-concept provides information about children with difficulties in the area of reading, writing and math. Indeed, significant correlation between self-concept and performance were found. Children with poor self-concept showed significant lower levels of performance and poorer grades comparing to children with better self-concept. In addition, a group of children showed high, but unrealistic self-concept. Especially theses children, who overestimated their abilities, are further investigated and compared to children with a tendency to underestimate their abilities. Self-concept – Elementary School – New Instrument 33 Easy to read text for students with intellectual disability Inmaculada Fajardo, Vicenta Avila, Gema Tavares & Antonio Ferrer University of Valencia infabra@uv.es The aim of this study was twofold: 1) To test the reading comprehension levels of a corpus of easy-to-read texts by intellectually disabled students 2) To examine the relationship between texts’ linguistics variables, on the one hand, and reading comprehension performance on the other. Our results indicate that the corpus of easy-to-read texts tested is actually comprehended by our sample of intellectually disabled students, especially to the literal level. The analyses of linguistics features of the texts revealed that the number of connectives of the texts interfere with readers’ literal comprehension. This result is discussed against previous studies showing facilitative effects of connectives for poor readers (Sanders, Land and Mulder, 2007). Easy to Read Texts – Students with Intellectually Disabilities – Literal and Inferential Reading Comprehension 34 Stories of adults with ADHD in the web: A grounded theory study Amos Fleischmann & Erez C. Miller Achva College of Education amosfl@gmail.com Adults with ADHD face many daily challenges in everyday functioning (Barkley, Murphy & Fisher, 2007). The present study used Web sites as a source of information of retrospective perception of adults with AD(H)D diagnosed in adulthood. We examined how these adults perceived the influence of significant others on their functioning and self-perception, and how the diagnosis of AD(H)D in adulthood changed those perceptions. 71 life stories were analyzed using grounded theory method. All narrators described difficulties with performing tasks, which led many of them to experience failures and confusion. Significant others did not understand why they were so challenged by everyday tasks, and thereby criticized them. That constant criticism resulted in a loss of willingness to cope and their faith in their ability to succeed. The conflict between the need to perform duties and difficulty with performing these tasks took a toll. Many narrators became worn under that toll and experienced depression. The diagnosis of AD(H)D led to and understanding of the reason for their woes, to seek out solutions and to believe that they could finally cope with their challenges. Their burden was reduced following the use of psychopharmacological treatment and coping strategies, which helped these individuals turn their lives into more enjoyable, consistent and predictable. Our findings indicate that the sense of overload had a central role in these individuals' difficulties in coping with AD(H)D. The diagnosis enabled those narrators who were willing to adopt appropriate strategies to reduce their overload, thus increasing their belief their ability to conduct meaningful and successful life. However, a few of the narrators did not manage to escape their sense of heavy load and therefore found it difficult to seek proper treatment or implement useful coping strategies. The salutogenic theory (Antonovsky, 1987) demonstrates that successful coping with difficulties is necessary for the individual to feel a sense coherence, i.e., living with a sense of influence over one's life, of understanding of one's life circumstances, and of leading a meaningful life. ADHD – Adults – Internet 35 Fostering children with learning disabilities in mathematics in secondary school 1 2 2 Elisabeth Moser Opitz , Okka Freesemann , Ina Matull , Susanne Prediger 2 & Stephan Hußmann 2 1 Universität Zürich, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft 2 Technische Universität Dortmund emoser@ife.uzh.ch The data of PISA 2006 showed that every fifth 15-year-old in Germany can solve math problems only on a primary school level. Further research indicated that some of these pupils have not or have only partly acquired specific knowledge of primary school mathematics, the so called “basic subject matter” (e.g., counting competences, understanding of place value, problem solving). This is an important indicator, since very low proficiency in math not only prevents students from learning successfully but also could negatively affect their career opportunities. Based on an intervention study in Grade 5 (sponsored by “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung”), the purpose of this study is to evaluate a) if deficits can be remediated, b) if special needs instruction leads to an improvement in mathematics achievement, and c) if the type of instruction (small group instruction vs. classroom instruction) has an influence on the learning outcomes. The study is conducted with a sample of N = 143 pupils in Nordrhein-Westfalen with two intervention groups (A – small group instruction; B – classroom instruction) and a control group (groups matched by math achievement, IQ, age, gender). Over a period of 14 weeks, pupils were taught basic concepts like counting, place value, and basic operations. Post-tests will be carried out in March and July 2010. First results will be available in late summer 2010. Learning Disabilities in Mathematics – Secondary School – Mathematics Intervention 36 Impact of deficits in phonological processing on functionally illiterate adults Michael Grosche & Matthias Grünke University of Cologne michael.grosche@uni-koeln.de Problem: In order to create effective interventions for functional illiterates in literate societies, we must understand how adult basic education (ABE) learners learn to read and write. Unfortunately, we do not have a clear understanding whether the learning processes of ABE learners differ from the normal reading development in children, or whether ABE learners suffer from learning disabilities. Therefore, we test the hypothesis that reading problems of ABE learners are due to learning disabilities. Method: Since deficits in phonological processes are the primary cause of problems in reading development, we assessed phonological awareness (vowel substitution, phoneme categorization, and vowel length recognition), rapid automatized naming (rapid naming of digits, letters, and colors), and verbal working memory (pseudoword recall, word span of one- and three syllable words) in ABE learners and modeled error free latent variables. To rule out that deficits in phonological processing reflect a result of the lack of reading, we compared ABE learners not only with adults matched on chronological age but also with much younger but not reading impaired students in the same phase of reading acquisition. Results: With regard to the chronological age match, ABE learners were strongly impaired in phonological processing. In comparison with primary students, ABE learners performed more poorly in tasks of phonological awareness and verbal working memory, but outperformed primary students in rapid naming, probably due to their neurological maturation. Interpretation: Despite their heterogeneity, many ABE learners suffer from massive learning disabilities. In order to create effective training methods, we should use interventions concerned with learning disabilities. Such methods focus directly on phonological and orthographic processing and teach these skills by means of direct instruction. Adult Basic Education – Learning Disabilities – Phonological Processing 37 Youth at risk? Employment perspectives and job careers of young people after a two-year basic training course with Swiss Basic Federal VET Certificate Kurt Haefeli & Claudia Hofmann University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education kurt.haefeli@hfh.ch In Switzerland the old "VET elementary training" programme was replaced by a two-year basic training programme with a Federal VET Certificate. It provides a greater standardisation of training contents and objectives and should thus improve the employability of graduates and increase passage to further training. Various parties have suggested, however, that a number of youths are unable to meet the new demands and their occupational integration is therefore at risk. In a first longitudinal study (2006-2009) we investigated the vocational paths of learners in the two occupational sectors of gastronomy and retails (N=319). In a second, ongoing study we study two other sectors, home economics and joinery (N=206). The following questions were addressed: What type of youth (with respect to school background, social background etc.) graduates from a basic training programme with Federal VET Certificate? How do they experience and gauge their training (pressure in school and training establishment, level of satisfaction with training)? How does their professional situation look following graduation from the training programme (employability, mobility)? The results of the first study prove that the two-year basic training in the retail sales and gastronomy sectors increases passage to further training, most particularly to the three year training programme with Federal VET Certificate. They exhibit greater mobility than those elementary trainees in the same occupational field. Results of the ongoing second study will be presented at the SIG Meeting. Basic Vocational Training – Labour Market Integration – Students with Special Needs 38 Testing sign language development in deaf and hard-of-hearing children: The case of the German Sign Language Receptive Skills Test Tobias Haug Interkantonale Hochschule für Heilpädagogik Zürich (HfH) tobias.haug@hfh.ch The assessment of sign language development in deaf and hard-of-hearing children has been a long neglected area within the fields of special education and sign language linguistics. The increase in use of sign language as means of communication and instruction in schools for the deaf over the course of the last decades makes it necessary to test deaf children’s sign language skills and monitor their development.. However, there is still a lack of reliable and valid sign language assessments, as confirmed by the literature. This presentation addresses methodological, theoretical, cultural, and linguistic issues linked to sign language test development and -adaptation, drawing from recent research on the adaptation of a test from one sign language (British Sign Language) into another (German Sign Language). A group of 54 deaf children aged 3;9 to 10;10 years (M = 7;0) were tested on their comprehension of different morpho-syntactic structures in DGS, using a crosssectional design. 34 children came from deaf families, 20 from hearing families. Results show sound psychometric properties (e.g., item and distractor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha) of the adapted DGS test. Applying non-parametric statistics, variables such as the lengths of exposure to DGS, parental hearing status, and chronological age provided additional information explaining differences in performance, which are important for a proposed standardization. Furthermore, the findings entail important information on cultural, linguistic, methodological, and theoretical issues related to the adaptation of sign language tests from one sign language to another. All findings together contribute to a proposed model for test adaptation and test development with the focus on construct validation. Sign Language Tests – Sign Language Acquisition – Development – Psychometric Properties – Test Adaptation 39 Educational implications of deficits in executive functioning for children with specific language impairment 1 2 1 Lucy A. Henry , David Messer & Gilly Nash 1 London South Bank University 2 Open University - London henrylc@lsbu.ac.uk Background. Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a common developmental disorder where language proficiency does not match an individual’s other abilities. SLI appears to have significant negative consequences for concurrent and future functioning. Aims. The two goals of this research were: (1) to identify whether children and young people with SLI have significant impairments in a range of executive functioning skills, in addition to their known difficulties with phonological shortterm memory; and (2) to suggest possible educational interventions that might deal with the types of difficulties found. Method. Forty children and young people with SLI, 10-14-years of age, were included in the sample. The children and young people were assessed using a range of EF measures: executive-loaded working memory, switching, inhibition, planning and fluency. We also assessed simple measures of phonological and visuospatial short-term memory. The performance of children with SLI was compared with the performance of the same number of participants matched for chronological age (CA) and language age (LA). Findings. The children and young people with SLI showed significant deficits relative to CA controls on four of the five areas of executive functioning: executiveloaded working memory; fluency; planning; and inhibition. These difficulties occurred on both verbal and non-verbal measures. There was no evidence that children and young people with SLI had difficulties with switching. On simple measures of working memory, the children and young people with SLI showed marked difficulties with phonological short-term memory as expected (word and nonword span), but were not impaired on visuospatial short-term memory (Corsi span). Conclusions. When designing educational provision and treatment strategies for children and young people with SLI, account should be taken of their: (1) impairments in phonological short-term memory; and (2) broad difficulties with a range of executive tasks that are not confined to language. Executive Functioning – Children – Specific Language Impairment 40 Training effects in dynamic assessment: eye movement as indicator of problem solving behavior. Marco G.P. Hessels, Katia Vanderlinden & Hildalill Rojas University of Geneva marco.hessels@unige.ch Assessment of children with learning difficulties or intellectual disability with traditional intelligence tests is often criticized for its lack of reliability and (predictive) validity. Dynamic measures of learning capacity, on the contrary, have shown to provide both reliable and valid measures of children general intellectual abilities and prove to be good predictors of future learning. These measures, also called learning tests or tests of learning potential, use different procedures. In the present study we used a pretest – training – posttest procedure to evaluate the changes in problem solving behavior of children with and without learning difficulties as a result of the training. The training focuses on the rules and procedures one needs to apply to be able to solve analogical problems, e.g., systematic inspection of the matrix and the response alternatives, comparison of the different elements in the matrix and the inference and application of the relations found. Such training proves to be necessary as many children do not understand what is expected from them in such tasks and, as a consequence, do not use analogical reasoning to solve them. This in turn affects the construct validity of the measure. When applying learning test, it is generally assumed that children learn to engage in the processes needed for analogical problem solving during the training, and that the intra-individual variability in effective use of these processes at posttest is indicative of children’s learning capacity. In this study we try to show that the training indeed provokes children to engage in the appropriate processes for problem solving by analyzing their visual behavior during such tasks. The data illustrate that children with and without learning difficulties change their visual search behavior after training, showing more structured inspection patterns, more “intelligent” comparisons and spending more time on encoding the information in the matrix. Learning Potential – Analogical Reasoning – Eye Movement 41 Modification of typically developing preschoolers’ attitudes towards children with special educational needs through storyreading and film-viewing 1 Maria Kypriotaki & George Manolitsis 2 1 Gallos University Campus, Rethymno, Crete 2 University of Crete, Department of Preschool Education mkypriotaki@edc.uoc.gr The aim of the present study is to examine the effect representations of disability in stories and films have upon preschoolers’ beliefs and attitudes towards children with disabilities. The main hypothesis of the study was that non-disabled preschoolers who were to be read stories or watched films referring to disabled children or portraying friendships between disabled and non-disabled children would develop more positive beliefs and attitudes towards the disabled children than preschoolers who were not read similar stories or watched films in their class. Εighty four nondisabled preschool children (4-6 years old) took part in a 2-week intervention program involving story-reading about disabled children and 41 non-disabled preschool children (4-6 years old) took part in a 2-week intervention program involving film viewing about disabled children. Both experimental group’s beliefs and attitudes towards disabled children were compared to those of a control group of 108 non-disabled preschoolers who were read stories or watched films with no reference to disabilities. Preschoolers’ beliefs and attitudes towards non-disabled children were measured by the Acceptance Scale for Kindergarten–Revised (ASKR) before and after the intervention. The findings showed that after the end of intervention based on story-reading and film-viewing, the beliefs and attitudes of participants in both experimental groups were significantly modified in a similar positive level. Story Reading – Films – Attitudes towards Disabled Children 42 Long-term effects of early child care on the success of immigrant children at Swiss schools Andrea Lanfranchi University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education (HfH Zürich) andrea.lanfranchi@hfh.ch Within the framework of the Swiss National Research Programme 39 in the field of migration, a research group at the University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education in Zurich investigated the supportive measures given to four- and sixyear-old children in three Swiss towns. A preliminary survey consisting of a spot check of 876 Swiss, Albanian, Turkish, Portuguese and Italian children took place in Winterthur, Neuchâtel and Locarno in 1998. One year later – the younger children were now in kindergarten and the older ones in primary school first form -, the teachers were questioned about the performance status of the researched children. The results were compared to the former support forms (at home with their mothers, crèches, play groups, child minders, relatives or neighbours). The main result established that family-complementary supported children were significantly better assessed by their kindergarten and teachers of the first primary school class in terms of their linguistic, cognitive and special skills than children, who grew up exclusively in the circle of their own family. In particular, thanks to the transitory space of a family-complementary environment, children from migration families managed the first days at school significantly better than children who were obliged to manage in an alien environment without the benefit of the transitory period. – The current research project (follow-up / Swiss National Science Foundation no. 100014113909) is intended to provide data about children from the sample acquired at the time for the third time in order to review possible long-term effects: Does familycomplementary support in pre-school age (in child minders etc.) have any lasting effects on scholastic success, i.e. can the positive effects established after the first days at school continue to be observed after a period of eight years? Our results show that family-complementary child care represents only 10 % of the variance in scholastic success. The family remains the most important factor before and during school, in particularly the parents’ expectations regarding the educational achievement of their children. The positive effects found during the school entry phase could thus no longer be substantiated with upper school transition, as they were meanwhile covered by much more fundamental factors, first and foremost the parents’ educational aspiration. Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) – Immigrants – Equal Possibilities 43 The evaluation of two prevention programs in day-care centers (EVA) Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Luise Läzer & Nicole Pfenning Sigmund-Freud-Institut, Frankfurt m.leuzinger-bohleber@sigmund-freud-institut.de The longitudinal study EVA reviews the differential effects of two established prevention programs – the violence prevention curriculum FAUSTLOS and the psychoanalytically based prevention program of EARLY STEPS. Compared to a previous representative field study carried out in Frankfurt 2003 until 2006 by the Sigmund-Freud-Institute, where the EARLY STEP program proved to significantly reduce aggression and hyperactivity in children, this follow-up study now tries to more specifically address a „high risk sample“ of children with a problematic social background. The selection of the sample is based on a representative survey of all Frankfurt kindergartens, where then 14 kindergartens with a problematic social structure were randomly allocated to both interventions (cluster randomized controlled trial). To grasp the interventions’ effects on the children’s development, diverse psychopathological symptoms such as aggression, hyperactivity, anxiety, oppositional behavior, psychosomatic and depressive symptoms as well as prosocial skills are captured using questionnaire measures, filled in by parents as well as teachers. Amongst others, these include the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form, the perik and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. In order to capture the attachment type and its possible modification, we apply the video-based attachment instrument Manchester Child Attachment Story Task. First results of the premeasurement are discussed and related to the specific high risk population. Psychoanalytic Prevention – High Risk Population – Attachment 44 Working memory, basic arithmetics and numerical competencies in subgroups of children with mathematical disabilities Claudia Mähler & Kirsten Schuchardt University of Hildesheim maehler@uni-hildesheim.de The study to present is dealing with cognitive characteristics in children with mathematical disabilities. We examined domain-general working memory deficits and domain-specific knowledge deficits, especially knowledge of basic facts and number competencies. The main questions were a) What kind of deficits do children with mathematical disabilities show? and b) Is there a difference between children with pure mathematical disorders compared to children with combined disorders of scholastic skills with respect to working memory and basic numerical knowledge? In our study we carried out an extensive test battery (working memory tests assessing central executive functions, phonological loop and visual-spatial sketchpad, basic arithmetics like addition and subtraction, basic numerical competencies like counting forward and backward, read and write numbers or estimate quantities) with children showing either only mathematical deficits (n = 22) or mathematical and verbal (reading and writing) deficits (n = 30) and a typically developing control group (n = 30). The results indicated that children with mathematical disabilities show significant deficits in working memory, basic arithmetical facts and numerical competencies. However, children with pure mathematical disabilities clearly outperformed children with combined arithmetic and reading disorders in the present study. Mathematical Disabilities – Working Memory – Numerical Competencies 45 Rehearsal strategies in children with dyslexia Nadine Malstädt, Martin Lehmann & Marcus Hasselhorn IDeA – Center for Research on Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk malstaedt@dipf.de The well-known overlapping waves theory provided by Siegler (1996, 2000) states that at any given age children have a repertoire of diverse strategies and make use of them when faced with learning demands. In recent studies variability in strategy use was also found in rehearsal strategies. Rehearsal can be characterized as the inner repetition of content that should be remembered and differentiated into qualitatively different forms as passive (labeling, singular rehearsal) and active behavior (cumulative rehearsal). In a longitudinal study by Lehmann and Hasselhorn (2007) the classical assumptions on the stepwise development from passive towards active forms were refined since a gradual shift from labeling to cumulative rehearsal was present with increasing age. Strategy development in children with learning disabilities, as for example with dyslexia, seems to differ from unimpaired children but only few studies investigate specifically their application of memory strategies like rehearsal or the respective path of development. There is evidence that children with dyslexia display impaired rehearsal since many studies highlighted phonological processing deficits and verbal short-term memory impairment in those children. This leads us to the hypothesis that children with and without dyslexia develop differently when using rehearsal strategies. In the present longitudinal study detailed analyses were used to detect differences in rehearsal strategies and their possible factors. Forty-five children with and without dyslexia are tested for the first time at the beginning of fourth grade and administered in a free-recall and a working memory task. Testing will be repeated four times, with measurement points separated by 6 months. Differences in children with and without dyslexia are examined and results on age-specific behaviors in rehearsal use and its consequences on performance are discussed. Finally, the validity of Siegler’s overlapping waves theory (especially variability, adaptivity and the efficiency in strategy use) in children with dyslexia is addressed. Learning Strategies – Rehearsal – Dyslexia 46 Measuring deaf children’s vocabulary knowledge in British sign language Wolfgang Mann & Chloe Marshall City University London Wolfgang.Mann.1@city.ac.uk We investigated whether knowledge of British Sign Language (BSL) vocabulary constitutes a hierarchy in which some degrees of knowledge are more advanced than others and presuppose the less advanced degrees of knowledge. 24 native or nearnative signing children (aged 4-15 years) completed four web-based tasks which measured different degrees of the strength of the mapping between form and meaning of BSL signs: form/meaning association, form recall, form recognition, and meaning recognition. Signers performed at significantly different levels of accuracy on each task, with meaning recognition being the easiest and form/meaning association the hardest. The results indicate that signers’ knowledge of mapping between form and meaning in BSL signs is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon but depends on what the learner is required to with the knowledge, as is the case for spoken languages. By assessing participants’ knowledge of each sign in four different ways, our methodology overcomes some of the limitations of conventional vocabulary tests, which measure vocabulary size by focusing on only one area of knowledge, usually meaning recognition or form recall. In this regard, our test promises to be useful to teachers and speech language therapists, who are working in a bilingual setting, for identifying deaf children’s level of vocabulary knowledge and informing the development of suitable intervention measures. Vocabulary – Form-Meaning-Mapping – Sign Language 47 Learning and teaching within diversity: A case study about Deaf students’ inclusion in a regular secondary school 1 Joaquim Melro & Margarida César 2 1 Escola António Arroio 2 Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação joaquimmelro@gmail.com Inclusive education is a main topic in policy documents. But it is not always implemented in daily school practices (César & Ainscow, 2006). The Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994) was a main step regarding inclusive education. According to it all students must have access to a quality education and equity in their educational opportunities. These ideals are particularly important for Deaf students. Belonging to a minority culture and speaking a minority language (Portuguese Sign Language), they face cultural and language barriers, because they are taught in a second language. Those barriers do not encourage their academic learning and their inclusion in the society. Assuming and interpretative approach (Denzin, 2000), we developed a case study (Stake, 1995) designed to know the social representations and feelings of all Deaf adult students (N=9) from a school in Lisbon. This study aims at knowing how Deaf students experience their inclusion process and if inclusive education is close or far away from its ideals. The participants were these Deaf students, their teachers, the researcher and other significant educational agents. Data collecting instruments included interviews (audio or video taped), observation, documents and tasks inspired in projective techniques. Data was treated through a narrative content analysis (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998), from which inductive categories emerged (Hamido & César, 2009). We discuss examples based in students’ accounts. They allow us understanding how the mediation of an oral language and of this school’s culture is distressing for students’ acting and feelings, because it is in a language other than their own. Instead of highlighting the richness of diversity, many of this school practices try to promote homogeneity, adopting a cultural model as unique and forgetting curricular flexibility (Melro & César, 2009a). Thus, these students still experience different forms of exclusion in a system that was supposed to include them. Inclusive Education – Deaf Education – Cultural and Linguistic Diversity 48 “It’s to do with the teaching”: Developing an inclusive pedagogy through teacher professional development in children’s mathematical thinking. Lio Moscardini University of Strathclyde l.moscardini@strath.ac.uk This paper compares the findings of two studies that investigated teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about supporting children in their mathematical learning before and after taking part in a professional development programme, Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI), that focused on children’s mathematical thinking. The first study was carried out with twelve teachers in three Scottish special schools for primary-aged (elementary) children with moderate learning difficulties. The second study, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation under the New Approaches to Learning strand, Grant Reference Number 08-3662, replicated the first study, with 21 teachers in twelve mainstream primary schools. CGI is a research-based professional development programme developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Carpenter et al., 2000). It involves supporting teachers in building a deep knowledge of children’s mathematical thinking so that this knowledge can be applied to practice in order to support mathematical learning as a sense-making activity. The research explored teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about learning and teaching of mathematics with children of a wide range of ability. The study considers the implications this professional development had on teachers’ capacity to support all learners in learning mathematics with understanding and explores the relevance of CGI as an inclusive pedagogy (McIntyre, 2009). Both studies found that, prior to professional development in CGI, teachers had a fragmented knowledge of children’s mathematical thinking. Following the development in CGI, teachers felt better placed to support all learners. The findings support the view that there is not a unique body of pedagogical knowledge required by teachers to support struggling learners in mathematics. The studies conclude that a more inclusive pedagogy in elementary mathematics teaching involves the development of pedagogical content knowledge. This development is situated within classroom activity and involves teachers reflecting on interaction with pupils. Inclusive Pedagogy – Mathematical Thinking Pedagogical 49 Content Knowledge – Children’s Accelerating the reading and calculating process in German elementary school children: An investigation of the acceleration phenomenon’s transferability Telse Nagler, Marcus Hasselhorn & Sven Lindberg DIPF (Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung); IDeA (Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk) t.nagler@idea-frankfurt.eu This study aims to replicate the reading skill based acceleration phenomenon (for overview see Breznitz & Berman, 2003) in the German language and focuses, moreover, on the transferability of the phenomenon to basic calculation processing. A sample of 80 children in grade 3 (20 with reading difficulties, 20 with calculating difficulties, 20 with reading and calculating difficulties and 20 with normal reading and calculating achievements) will be investigated in a classical acceleration phenomenon set-up. Subjects reading speed, accuracy and comprehension measurements will be determined in the normal and accelerated reading condition. Subjects are asked to answer questions regarding the sentences for reading comprehension measurements. The reading performance will be recorded via audio file for analyses of reading quality and speed. Acceleration benefits are compared within and across groups. The subjects will further solve simple calculation tasks in their individual processing speed as well as in an accelerated speed condition. The processing speed and accuracy will be measured and compared. Earlier results show that normal and poor readers profit from the reading acceleration. These studies show better results in reading fluency, accuracy and comprehension in the accelerated compared to normal reading condition. We expect German elementary school children to benefit from the reading acceleration in the same way and further expect the poor readers to show increased improvement compared to normal readers. Since the acceleration phenomenon has not been applied to other cognitive areas, the results of the math acceleration are not yet clearly foreseeable. The subjects are expected to profit from the math acceleration as well, showing better results in the accelerated condition. The focus onto a group of children with combined poor reading and calculating performances can further help to detect possible transfer effects. The expected findings would therefore not only have novel but also intervention implementation character. Reading – Calculating – Acceleration Phenomenon 50 Learning disabled students’ task commitment, persistence, and performances in mathematics: A matter of general motivational components or situated motivational processes? Greta Pelgrims University of Geneva, Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l’éducation Greta.Pelgrims@unige.ch With respect to learned helplessness theory, it is still frequently stated that students with learning disabilities develop a helplessness response style to learning. This general motivational deficit is presumed to increase the risk of ongoing failure, uncontrollable attributions leading to low selfconcept, failure expectations, loss of confidence, less engagement in learning tasks, and, consequently, to poor performances reinforcing helplessness attributions. Nevertheless, these statements and the presumed determining role of general motivational components lack of evidence to understand task avoidance and coping strategies learning disabled students show when faced to actual learning tasks in special education classrooms. Adopting a situated approach to study learning motivation in school contexts, our research contributes to clarify to what extend the influence of general motivational components in mathematics (attributions, self-concept, fear of failure, affective selfregulation) on learning intention, persistence and performances, is mediated by the way students appraise an actual mathematics task and self-regulate their motivation and emotions during task achievement. Our study has been carried out with 9 to 12 years old learning disabled students attending selfcontained special education classrooms. Self-reported motivational data have been submitted to path analyses. Results confirm the mediating role of task appraisals, and contribute to question the role attribution beliefs, as well as other general motivational components, actually play into students’ task commitment and learning performances. Learning Disabilities – Situated Motivation – Learning Commitment 51 The role of special education teaching practices into learning disabled students’ motivational and emotional self-regulation Greta Pelgrims University of Geneva, Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l’éducation Greta.Pelgrims@unige.ch Observational studies reveal that teaching practices into special education classrooms have particular features compared to practices observed in regular elementary classrooms: less instructional time devoted to main academic knowledge and competencies in language and mathematics, less interactions fostering comprehension, strategy use and metacognitive processes, more tasks focusing specific knowledge, more hints and teachers’ intervention controlling the students behavior and activity… Now, other observational studies show that students with learning disabilities and behavioral disorders exhibit more learning task avoidance and other coping strategies. Their engagement and persistence into learning mainly rely on these external controlling interventions, and students insufficiently activate self-regulation processes. Research on self-regulated learning stress the importance of cognitive, affective and behavioural self-regulation processes to learn and succeed at school. In this perspective, avoidance and coping strategies might be associated with a lack of motivational and emotional self-regulation. Our study examines to what extend teaching practices frequently observed into special education classrooms affect the development of affective self-regulation strategies in mathematics, and, consequently self-efficacy and attribution beliefs. It is carried out with 10 to 12 years old students presenting learning disabilities and behavioral disorders. Results reveal that the habituation to the specific teaching practices and learning conditions observed into special education classrooms harm the students disposition to selfregulate their attention, motivation and emotions when they are faced with mathematics learning tasks. Teaching Practices – Self-Regulation – Coping Strategies 52 The phonological short-term memory of children with intellectual disabilities: Are their redintegration processes less efficient? Sebastian Poloczek1, Gerhard Büttner1 & Marcus Hasselhorn2 1 Goethe-University, Frankfurt 2 DIPF (Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung) In order to address special educational needs of children with intellectual disabilities (ID), it is crucial to further the understanding of their memory functions and limitations. The development of the visuospatial short-term memory and the central executive loaded working memory seem to be broadly in line with their slowed intellectual development. However, there might be some differences in their development of the phonological short-term memory, since children with ID perform slightly worse than mental age (MA) matched children on phonological short-term memory (PSTM) task. But until now, it is not well understood why the performance on PSTM tasks is impaired. Memory traces quickly decay in the phonological store. At recall redintegration seems to aid PSTM performance by reconstructing words from partially degraded memory traces. The phonological similarity effect probably arises from confusions in reconstructing degraded memory traces. Children with ID show a phonological similarity effect (PSE), but the size of the PSE is could be reduced. Possibly redintegration does not function as efficiently in children with ID as in typically developing children. In the present study, 56 children with mild or borderline intellectual disabilities (911year-olds) and 56 typically developing children matched for mental age (6-7 yearolds) completed serial and probed recall tasks with phonologically dissimilar as well as similar sounding words. All three recall conditions yielded a significant PSE for children with and without ID, but the PSE was less pronounced in children with ID. However, this difference between children with ID and MA matched children was only significant in the verbal serial recall condition. The results indicate that redintegration seems to play a role in the memory performance of children with ID. Because of the reduced PSE verbal serial recall, the hypothesis of less efficient redintegration in children with ID is partially supported and merits further research. Intellectual Disabilities – Phonological Short-Term Memory – Redintegration 53 Dyslexia and co-occurring emotional and behavioral problems after controlling for ADHD Chantal S. Rietz, Wolfgang Woerner & Andju Sara Labuhn Dipf, IDeA rietz@dipf.de About 7-8 % of all primary school children suffer from dyslexia. Dyslexia is associated with increased risks of both externalizing and internalizing disorders (Terras, Thompson, & Minnis, 2009). Severe behavioral and emotional problems may also be associated with the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which commonly co-occurs with reading problems (Kain, Landerl, & Kaufmann, 2008). Therefore, emotional and behavioral problems associated with dyslexia may in fact be a function of comorbid ADHD, rather than being a correlate of dyslexia per se. The purpose of this study is to examine the occurrence of emotional and behavioral problems in children with dyslexia after controlling for ADHD. Our sample consisted of 43 primary school children, all attending fourth grade. We compared three groups: children with dyslexia, children with dyslexia and comorbid ADHD (comorbid group) and a control group without any of the disorders. The occurrence of emotional and behavioral problems was assessed with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire for parents (Goodman, 1997). ADHD was diagnosed by the FBB-ADHS (Döpfner, Görtz-Dorten, Lehmkuhl, Breuer, & Goletz, 2008). Children with dyslexia showed an enhanced total difficulties score; the comorbid group showed an even higher total difficulties score compared to the other two groups. Further analyses suggest that children with dyslexia and ADHD exhibit more emotional problems and less prosocial behavior. Dyslexia – Comorbidity – Problems 54 Index for commitment to inclusion Marina Santi & Elisabetta Ghedin University of Padua, Faculty of Educational Sciences marina.santi@unipd.it In the Italian context the children with special educational needs and disabilities are included in mainstream schools since the Italian legislation had recognised the importance of the process of inclusion to the activity and participation dimensions of the child and the importance of the environmental factors to the determination of a disability. Starting from the “Index for inclusion” (Booth et al., 2000) the purpose of this study is to modify this document by simplifying and compressing the items and to create an instrument that can be more easy to use. The new “Index for Commitment to inclusion” can be used by the schools in a double way: - to recognise specific actions for inclusion in which schools are committed to, and which could be observed, implemented and evaluated; - to certificate and accredit their process of inclusion. In the first phase of the study we have created three tools to which schools, students and parents/carers give their responses (based on a 6-point scale) considering the process to inclusion of their school. A representative group of schools (primary and secondary schools) of the Veneto Region spread over all the different provinces is involved, in collaboration with the Regional Instructional Office and an on line form of the tools is provided. The second phase of the research will extend the participation to all Veneto Schools. The implications of these findings are considerable because the study provides results directly derived from the application of a Commitment version of Index in which the corresponding actions for inclusion made by teachers and schools politics in that direction are expressed and became sharable and available among different institutions and evaluable also by families and students. The data implementation is still in progress and will be presented and discussed in the paper, as well as the main educational implications of the results. Inclusion – Index – Commitment 55 Inclusion and professional Development: Concerns, attitudes and sentiments 1 Joel Santos & Margarida César 2 1 Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada 2 Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação joelpalmasantos@gmail.com In the 21st century, societies are characterised by their complexity and diversity. Alike societies, schools are also characterised as complex and diverse spaces/times (César, 2009). In Portugal we observe a growing diversity among students that attend the mainstream schools. Therefore, developing inclusive practices is a fundamental step for the construction of educational settings that welcome the difference as a valuable resource for all (Ainscow, 1999; Armstrong, Armstrong, & Barton, 2000; César & Santos, 2006; UNESCO, 1994). Thus, it is essential to study changes promoted by pre- and in-service education on the sentiments, attitudes and concerns of the educational agents towards inclusive education (IE) (Forlin, Loreman, Sharma, & Earle, 2007; Loreman, Earle, Sharma, & Forlin, 2007). This work is part of a broader project Educação Inclusiva e Processos de Formação whose main goal is to study the sentiments, attitudes and concerns presented by educational agents, before and after attending pre- and in-service education, and curricular units regarding IE. We developed this study assuming an interpretive approach. It was carried through a long panel survey. This study sub-sample includes educational agents (N=81) attending higher education in the Lisbon area. To collect data we used: (1) documents; and (2) the SACIE – Sentiments, Attitudes & Concerns about Inclusive Education scale, by Loreman, Earle, Sharma, and Forlin, (2006). This scale was answered in two moments: at the beginning and at the end of the selected curricular units. When the results of these two moments are confronted, a slightly increasing number of participants indicate more inclusive sentiments and attitudes towards students characterized as presenting SEN (Special Education Needs). The results also show a high level of concern towards IE. Inclusive Education – Educational Agents – Attitudes 56 Differential effects of a mathematical training of first-graders in elementary schools and special schools Daniel Sinner & Jan Kuhl Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Pädagogische Psychologie Daniel.sinner@psychol.uni-giessen.de Object: In Germany the construct “learning disability” refers to the group of students lying between children with mental retardation and normal achievers. Theoretically, learning disability is associated with failure in reading, writing and math and an IQ at least one standard deviation below the mean. There are two forms of schooling for learning disabled children: about 85 % visit special schools, 15 % are integrated in conventional elementary school classes. As one of the main deficits of learning disabled children is a lack of mathematical performance, the aim of the following study was to compare training effects of a Quantity-Number-Competencies (QNC)-training. Children with learning disabilities from special schools and children from elementary school classes with similar IQ and similar math performance were compared. Method: 24 children aged 6.5 – 8.5 in their first or second school year participated. 12 children visited special schools and 12 children were from elementary schools. In each school setting 6 children were trained for six weeks with a QNC-training (experimental group) while 6 children got an inductive reasoning training (control group). Right after intervention the post-test followed. Five months later 23 children took part in the follow-up. The ability to solve arithmetical operations up to 10 was also measured in all three dates. The four groups were matched by intelligence and QNC-pretest. Mean IQ in each group was about 85. Findings: Post-test results showed that both QNC-training groups outperformed the control groups in the QNC-test. The effects were similar in both school settings. But like the result of the follow-up-study showed, this effect was not stable over time. Here a significant effect of school setting appeared, showing that children in the elementary school groups performed better than special school-students did. A transfer to basic arithmetical performance failed. We could not find significant differences in the post-test. In follow-up there was a main effect of school setting. Elementary school children solved also more operations than special school children did. Learning Disability – Early Intervention – Mathematical Development 57 Interaction patterns leading to learning gains: How to measure and how to interpret? Floor van Loo & G.M. van der Aalsvoort Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Education floor.vanloo@hu.nl Our research efforts aim at understanding what optimal circumstances are for the training phase of a learning potential test. Our main question was: Can we detect effective interaction patterns, i.e. patterns which lead to effective task behavior of the child during the training phase? We used data of the training phase of the Classification test. This is a subtest of the Application of Cognitive Functions Scales (ACFS), a learning potential test developed by Lidz (2000). As the administration was videotaped we were able to observe more closely what happened. The training phase was transcribed and analyzed. Based upon a dynamic systems approach a coding system was developed and application of Mediacoder (Steenbeek, 2009) allowed us to test our first four hypotheses by microgenetic analysis. The fifth hypothesis was tested by relating the number of patterns to the post test measure. We found successive interaction patterns with regard to focusing, asking for explanation, positive feedback and teaching strategies of the diagnostician and taskrelated behavior of each child. Only the first hypothesis was accepted: there is an interaction pattern with respect to focusing of the diagnostician and task-oriented behavior of the child. However, we found different patterns with each child. These patterns reveal the unique reciprocal processes that unfold during the training phase. Our fifth hypothesis was also accepted: effective interaction is related to learning gains. A dynamic systems approach may assist us in understanding why children profit from a training phase to allow learning from instruction in the zone of proximal development. We aspire not only to measure interaction patterns, but also to develop a dynamic system model that predicts changes in interaction patterns between diagnosticians and children in relationship to learning gains. Dynamic Interaction Patterns – Learning Potential Test – Learning Gains, Microgenetic Data-Analysis 58 Participating in mathematics classes: Blind students experiences of inclusion 1 2 Cláudia Ventura , Margarida César & Nuno Santos 3 1 Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia 2 Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação 3 Escola Secundária de D. Dinis, Lisboa cventura3@gmail.com Inclusive education principles were assumed in many countries since the Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994). This brought new challenges to the mainstream schools, as many students categorized as presenting special educational needs were included in mainstream classes (César & Ainscow, 2006). In order to befit students’ needs, characteristics and interests teachers must be aware of their communicative processes. This is particularly important when we focus on blind students (Santos, 2008). They mainly use audition for communicating in mathematics classes. They read and write in Braille. Thus, they use mathematical symbols that are not always the same as the ones used by their non-blind peers (e.g., in fractions) (Santos & César, 2007). We developed a study that is part of the Interaction and Knowledge research project whose main goal was to study and promote peer interactions in formal educational scenarios. We focused in the mainstream classes that included blind students (Santos & César, 2007; Santos, Ventura, & César, 2008). We assumed an interpretative approach and developed an action-research project. The participants were the students from those classes, their mathematics teachers, and significant others. These students attended classes from 7th to 12th grades. The data collecting instruments were the participant observation, questionnaires, tasks inspired in projective techniques, an instrument to evaluate students’ abilities and competences, documents and students’ protocols. An in-depth and successive narrative content analysis was developed from which inductive categories emerged (César, 2009). The analysis of some interactive patterns and examples of blind students mathematical performances illuminate that teachers need to be aware of the particularities of blind students’ interactive patterns and needs. They also illustrate what can be done in order to overcome the barriers these students experience when they try to appropriate cultural mathematical tools and to participate in mathematics classes. Inclusive Education – Blind – Mathematics 59 The observation-system for the analysis of aggressive behaviour in classroom-settings BASYS Alexander Wettstein PHBern University of Applied Sciences Switzerland alexander.wettstein@phbern.ch Educational or therapeutic measures of aggressive student behavior are often based on the judgments of teachers. Empirical studies show that the objectivity of these judgments is generally low. Starting from an ecological and a situational perspective we developed a context-sensitive observational system, BASYS, in order to assess aggressive behavior in classroom settings. The observational system was developed and tested in four field-studies in regular and special classes. With the observation-system for the analysis of aggressive behavior in classroomsettings BASYS (Wettstein, 2008) aggressive behavior of 9 to 16 year old students can be analyzed. BASYS exists in a version for teachers in action as well as a version for the uninvolved observer. The BASYS-L, the adaptation for teachers, allows categorizing aggressive behavior while teaching. The aim is to differentiate the perception and the judgments of teachers, so that the judgments can serve as trustable diagnostic information. BASYS-F, the version for an independent observer, in addition contains categories to collect information about the context in which aggressions take place. We show how the interactive observer training BASYS and the program for an automatic statistical evaluation can be implemented in diagnostics and in teacher training. The empirical results show, that after training, teachers were able to make objective observations and that aggressive behavior depends to a large extent on situational factors. BASYS allows identification of problematic people-environment relationships and the derivation of intervention measures. Aggression – Behavior Observation – Diagnostics 60 Aggression in environments of adolescent boys and girls: Four single case studies with camera—glasses Alexander Wettstein PHBern University of Applied Sciences Switzerland alexander.wettstein@phbern.ch Most individuals pass adolescence without excessive problems. However, aggressive adolescents with severe behaviour disorders living in residential homes are confronted with a difficult twofold task. Besides behaviour disorders, they might have to cope with environmental challenges which, presumably, go beyond their social-behavioural skills. Based on this hypothesis we introduced an ambulatory methodology for recording environmental scenes in which aggressive behaviour possibly arises. By means of glasses with a built-in camera, which were worn by two adolescents with severe external behaviour disorders, aged between 11-13 years, we recorded their daily environmental scenes and interactions. These recordings were compared with environmental recordings of two adolescents without behaviour disorders. The results indicate that adolescents in residential homes are more frequently exposed to aversive settings. They have less peer interaction, a reduced life space (Streifraum) and become more often victims of their peer’s aggressive behaviour than the contrast group. Aggression – Camera-Glasses – Ambulatory Assessment 61 The effect of activating the identity of being learning disabled on cognitive test performance Jürgen Wilbert & Matthias Grünke University of Cologne, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department for Special Education When membership to a negatively stereotyped group is activated and people are at risk to confirm this stereotype, their self-worth is threatened. From this finding Steele and colleagues developed the theory of stereotype threat. The effect of negative stereotypes on cognitive performance has been shown repeatedly. Up to now, research has focused primarily on women’s math performance and intellectual test performance of African Americans. Croizet and Claire have proposed that stereotype threat effects may be applicable to social classes as well. They showed that activating the fact of belonging to a class of low economic status led to diminished test performance. Less research has been done on the relation of stereotype threat and disabilities. German students with severe learning problems are mostly educated in separated schools and are labeled “learning disabled”. They are broadly stereotyped to fail in intellectual tasks. For this reason, we wanted to know whether or not attending a school for learning disabled students may evoke stereotype. In a first exploratory study, we tested for the general existence of stereotype threat effects with learning disabled students. Therefore, we randomly assigned twenty-one 10th grade students from a school for learning disabled to two experimental groups. Both groups performed intelligence test tasks. Ahead of this, the stereotype-group was asked which school they attended, while the control-group was asked for the weekday. As hypothesized, we found significant lower test performance in the stereotyped group. In a second study we replicated these findings with 150 students from 5th to 10th grade. We tested for two additional hypotheses. Firstly, following self-concept research we expected stereotype threat effects not to be present in the lower grades and secondly, we expected greater test anxiety in the stereotyped group. Both hypotheses were corroborated. Results and their implication for achievement diagnostics and school tracking are discussed. Learning Disabilities – Stereotype Threat – Test Anxiety 62 Poster Presentations (Abstracts in alphabetical order) 63 Early Intervention for children with hearing loss: Mothers' involvement, maternal characteristics and context-based perceptions 1 Michal Al-Yagon & Sara Ingber 2 1 Bar-Ilan University, School of Education 2 Tel-Aviv University, School of Education alyagom@mail.biu.ac.il This study examined the contribution of a model of maternal characteristics in explaining mothers’ involvement in the early intervention of their 1- to 7-year-old children with hearing loss. The model of maternal factors affecting their involvement in intervention comprised: (a) four personal characteristics conceived as exogenous (i.e., independent) variables – anxiety, curiosity, and anger traits as well as motivation; and (b) two maternal context-based perceptions conceived as mediating variables: mothers' perception of pessimism regarding the child’s potential and perception of available informal support. The sample included 114 mother-child dyads (67 boys, 47 girls) who attended the Kesher early intervention program in central Israel. Path analysis indicated a high fit between the theoretical model and the empirical findings. Discussion focused on understanding the unique value of mothers’ characteristics for their involvement in their children’s early intervention. Children with Hearing Loss – Maternal Involvement – Early Intervention 64 Teacher related aspects influencing the acquisition of number sense within kindergarten classrooms Anton J.H. Boonen, Meijke E Kolkman & Evelyn H. Kroesbergen Utrecht University A.J.H.Boonen@students.uu.nl An important precursor of advanced math skills is the understanding of numerical quantities and numbers. Although these ‘number sense’ abilities are often viewed as innate mathematical understandings, environmental input is necessary for sufficient development of these innate potentials of number acquisition. An important aspect that may stimulate the acquisition of number sense is the amount and diversity of the mathematical input provided by the teacher (teachers’ math talk). In our study we examined the mathematical input of 35 teachers with 9 different input categories (e.g. counting, calculation, ordering, and exploration of the days of the week). The results indicate that the role of each of these math talk categories is not as straightforward as we had expected beforehand. Although positive significant relations can be found for math talk categories like cardinality (stating the number of things in a set without counting them) and conventional nominatives (the use of numbers as labels for age, dates, or time), the associations between the math talk categories calculation (cases in which a teacher performed a calculation or asked a child to solve a calculation problem) and number symbols (instances in which a teacher labeled a written number symbol or asked a child to identify, write, or find a number symbol) and children’s score on specific number sense tasks are negative. Moreover, a large diversity in math talk shows also a negative relation with kindergartners’ number sense acquisition. These results suggest that the teacher’s math talk is related to kindergartner’s number sense. However, teachers should be careful and selective with the amount of math talk that is offered to young children, especially for those at risk for mathematical difficulties. Math Talk – Number Sense 65 The emotional development of children with dyslexia Maria - Efterpi Frangogianni University of Crete (Rethymno) maritafragogianni@yahoo.gr The focus of this study is to explore the emotional development of children with dyslexia. The participants of this study were students from three mainstream schools in South-West England. One of the most important reasons that the focus of this study is the emotional development of children with dyslexia is that the literature is very limited in this field. Much of the research is concentrated on the causes of dyslexia and on the characteristics of children with dyslexia. The first tool that was used in this study was the Joseph Picture Self-Concept Scale. This was used in order to evaluate the self-concept of children with dyslexia. The next stage of the study was to carry out semi-structured interviews. This tool was used in order to evaluate where do children with dyslexia attribute their outcomes and what kind of relationships children with dyslexia have with their peers. The last tool that was used in the study was the Individual Educational Plans (IEPs). The IEPs were given out by the Head Teachers and the Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) of the schools. These plans are used by the teachers and have a focus on the difficulties of the students and on ways that the school can help and support these difficulties. The IEPs offer an opportunity to compare and contrast the needs that a child has according to him/herself and according to the school. Results showed that children with dyslexia neither have negative self-concept, nor have positive self-concept. Children with dyslexia attribute their successes to external factors, and on the other hand their failures with internal. Results did however reveal that children with dyslexia have good relationships with their peers. Children with Dyslexia – Self-concept – Attributions of Success and Failure – Peer Relationships 66 Analysis of the use of different external representations and further elements of the problem solving process while working on complex story problems 1 1 1 2 Johannes Groß , Katharina Hohn , Siebel Telli , Renate Rasch & Wolfgang 3 Schnotz 1 University of Koblenz-Landau, DFG Graduate School “Teaching and Learning Processes” 2 University of Koblenz-Landau, Institute for Mathematics, 3 University of Koblenz-Landau, Department of Educational Psychology gross@uni-landau.de The aim of this study was the examination and analysis of the differences in the spontaneous use of various representations and further elements of the problem solving process on complex story problems at primary school mathematics, comparing students from two class levels and different ability groups. A total number of 18 students of 2nd and 20 students of 4th grade participated in the study. According to their results in a standardized intelligence test, they were divided into two groups: One of Higher Competence (HC) and one of Lower Competence (LC). In this study, students were given five complex story problems successively. In up to 40 minutes, they could work on these tasks. As for help the students got different working materials, which they were allowed to use at all times. The students were videotaped individually while working on the complex story problems. The video analysis software VIDEOGRAPH (Rimmele, 2002) was used to analyze the videos. The problem solving processes were analysed according to the solution schemes and a newly developed system of categories for this study. These devices of analysis complemented one another and together covered the entire problem solving process. ANOVA and MANOVA were conducted to compare the different ability groups and class levels. Our findings show that the ability groups and the class levels differed in terms of representations they used, as well as in the time they needed to solve the problems. Also, the total word problem score (the number of correctly solved tasks) differed in class levels and ability groups. The importance of other variables (i.e. mathematical and verbal skills) for the problem solving process are discussed, in the course of the analysis. Different Ability Groups – Elements of the Problem Solving Process – Complex Story Problems 67 Teaching critical thinking skills to future special educators Matthias Grünke & Jürgen Wilbert University of Cologne, Department of Special Education & Rehabilitation matthias.gruenke@uni-koeln.de The ability to think critically is a vital aptitude for special educators. They need to constantly analyze, compare, question and evaluate information. Their thinking must be aimed at making judgments based on evidence rather than conjecture in order to design appropriate individualized education plans and to prepare effective school lessons for children and youth with disabilities. Undergraduate special education teacher training programs at German Universities are designed to help college students acquire many different skills and competencies. One of them is the aforementioned ability to think critically. Prospective special educators at the University of Cologne must attend three different lectures on philosophy of science, evidence-based teaching, and applied research methodology during their first two semesters. In all three lectures, students are constantly confronted with problems which require a way of reasoning that helps one reach the best decision in given circumstances through careful evaluation of clues and evidences related to the subject matter. Critical thinking abilities are usually not an inherent outcome of higher education. However, it can be expected that special education students are better able to think critically upon attending the three lectures than those who just started their undergraduate studies. The German version of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) was administered to 107 freshmen and 102 sophomores who were enrolled in the BA special education program at the University of Cologne. The results from a comparison between two groups indicate that critical thinking abilities can be successfully taught within a rather short period of time. Sophomores scored significantly higher in all subtests of the WGCTA than freshmen. These findings are remarkable, because improvements in critical thinking abilities usually don’t improve during one’s years of study. Critical Thinking – Teacher Training – Undergraduate Students 68 The interaction of twin autistic brothers with teachers and peers in a Special Nursery Unit: A case study 1 2 2 Maria Kypriotaki , Maria Markodimitraki , Maria Ampartzaki 2 Linardakis & Michalis 1 Gallos University Campus, Rethymno, Crete 2 University of Crete, Department of Preschool Education mkypriotaki@edc.uoc.gr The aim of the present study is to explore interactions between dizygotic autistic twins of preschool age with their teachers and peers in a Special Nursery Unit. We observed interaction episodes in a naturalistic setting for four days (one day per week for a whole month). Data analysis was carried out by non-parametric tests due to the small size of the sample. Results showed significant differences between the twins: proximity to the teachers during interaction is higher for the first born in comparison to that of the second born twin. The first born displays negative feelings before interaction episodes which usually turn into positive during the episodes. The second born twin displays a rather stable emotional condition before, during and after interactions. Besides, he involves in interaction episodes more frequently than the first born (65% in comparison to 35% of the first born). There were no significant results regarding interactions with peers. It is more likely that the twins are going to take the initiative in order to come into contact with peers although it is the teachers who always initiate interactions with the two brothers. Besides, both teachers initiate interaction more frequently with the second born twin which results in a higher involvement with interactive play (75%). When the first born is involved in an interaction episode, this takes the form of solitary play in a dyad, or interactive play. Twin Autistic Brothers – Interaction – Teachers and Peers 69 Effectiveness of various communicating methods used by deaf students with additional developmental dysfunctions Catherine Plutecka Pedagogical University, Cracow plutecka@ap.krakow.pl This empiric research aims at drawing attention to various means of communication used by the subjects of the research in the communication process. The International Bureau for Audiophonology has classified dysfunctions which most frequently coexist with deafness. The authors listed e.g. such developmental dysfunctions as: dysphasia, personality disorders (autism, psychosis), intellectual disabilities, impairment of musculoskeletal system, blindness, and somatic diseases. In the research the diagnostic poll method was used together with such techniques as: analysis of documents and interview with a pedagogue, psychologist, teachers, parents and caretakers from the school dormitory. The interview questionnaire prepared by the author was used as the research tool. The research subject was a group of 39 students from Special School for Deaf Children in Kraków. According to the analysis of the empirical material one can notice that in the communicative activity of the students in question there are non-verbal codes that dominate; among which the following ones can be mentioned: gestures (39 subjects, 22,5%), facial expression (30 subjects, 17%), Polish Sign Language (PJM), visual – spatial language, without inflection (28 subjects, 16%), dactylography (25 subjects, 14%), body arrangement (15 subjects, 8,5%). Supplementary means for exchanging information are: writing (12 subjects, 7%), SJM, i.e. Language and Sign System, so called sign Polish which is a variety of spoken mother tongue (10 subjects, 6%), speaking (8 subjects, 4,5%), hearing (8 subjects, 4,5%). Educational and therapeutic activities should take into consideration the following forms of supporting the child's development: - complex and multi-dimensional diagnosis taking into concern the evaluation of cognitive and emotional processes of the child, - training of social and interpersonal abilities, - cooperation with the family and encouraging to communicating in an uniform way, according to strategies prepared by the therapist, - supporting the communicating process with alternative and auxiliary communication methods. 70 Means of Communication – Multimodal Communication – Deaf ChildrenCooperative practices and cognitive training: An approach to improve memory and attention in retarded students Ana Isabel Alves Silva & Helena Framrose Bilimória Instituto Piaget- ESE Jean Piaget Gaia aia.ana.silva@gmail.com Attention and Memory are two central cognitive functions in learning. Deficits in these functions interfere with learning. Students with mental retardation have difficulty in retrieving information from longterm memory as well as retaining information in short- term memory (Bray et al., 1997; Nielsen, 1999). On the other hand, students with mental retardation often have problems attending to relevant features of a learning task, frequently focusing on distracting irrelevant stimuli (Heward, 2006). These individuals can also have difficulty sustaining attention to learning tasks. These attention problems contribute to students’ difficulties in acquiring, remembering, and generalizing new knowledge and skills. The aim of our study is to explore how cooperative practices, namely peer mediated learning, imbedded in a cognitive training program, contribute to the development of cognitive functions of memory and attention on retarded children. The participants were 22 students with mental retardation, of a public, mainstream Portuguese school, aged 13 to 17. They were distributed by two groups: experimental and control group. There were two assessment moments- pretest and postest – in which the same memory and attention tasks were presented to the students with mental retardation. Also, there was a short program between them, with a range of tasks regarding attention and memory, with different contents: verbal, numerical and figural. Both groups were submitted to the program, however, in the experimental group, the tasks were solved based upon cooperative practices with students without educational needs; in the control group, the tasks were solved alone, by the student with mental retardation. The results will be presented, involving non-parametric comparative data analysis. The study contributes to the cognitive promotion of retarded students and to the inclusion theoretical debate. Inclusion – Cooperative Learning – Cognitive Promotion 71 Project IGEL (Individual Development and Adaptive Learning Environments in Primary School) 1 1 2 1 Jasmin Warwas , Katja Adl-Amini , Gerhard Büttner , Sanna-K. Djakovic , 2 2 1 1 Benjamin Fauth , Ilonca Hardy , Silke Hertel , Lena Hondrich , Eckhard 1,2 2 2 2 Klieme , Mareike Kunter , Arnim Lühken , Susanne Mannel & Alexander 1 Naumann 1 German Institute for International Educational Research 2 Goethe Universität Frankfurt warwas@dipf.de Schools and teachers are challenged every day to serve children's individual developmental needs in the context of heterogeneous learning environments. If children are not supported adequately, they face the risk of an unfavourable development and fewer chances of a successful participation in society. Thus, teachers have to assure that (a) each child is able to reach his or her full potential as well as that (b) all children meet the common curricular standards. In such successful classrooms, "adaptive learning environments" are created. Addressing this issue, the project IGEL (Individual Development and Adaptive Learning Environments in Primary School) of the IDeA Research Center, Germany, focuses on the development and the support of children at risk of school failure. Several adaptive teaching strategies which support children's development can be outlined. We focus on the following three strategies which are expected to be especially effective for children at risk of school failure: (1) Scaffolding, (2) Peer Learning, and (3) Formative Assessment. According to Raudenbush (2009, p. 176), we focus on the domain of science education to assess the effectiveness of the selected adaptive teaching strategies. Do children in adaptive learning environments develop more favourably in terms of cognitive and non-cognitive aspects compared to those in regular learning settings? And do trainings on adaptive teaching strategies in science education render particular support to the development of children at risk of school failure? We will address these questions within the context of a quasiexperimental intervention study with a treatment control group (parental counselling). We will implement teacher trainings on the selected adaptive teaching strategies, which focus on science education in the third grade of primary schools, and investigate their influence on teachers and pupils. To examine sustainable effects, we will perform concluding assessments at the end of the term. Adaptive Teaching Strategies – Children at Risk of School Failure – Science Education 72 Family and school environments in the context of work with an ADHD child Anna Wójcik Pedagogical Univeristy of Cracow, Department of Special Education felicjaw@hotmail.com Behaviors related to hyperactivity, impulsiveness and attention deficit seriously disturb or make an individual’s functioning in various environments impossible, strongly interfering in the systems which one participates in, forcing its members to an intensified care over a child. The systems perspective is fundamental to understand the child’ functioning in various environments, coexisting through interaction and exchange of information. To describe the school and family systems in the context of an ADHD child, I applied the case study method. Symptoms characteristic of ADHD influence the family system, its organization, structure, tasks completion, etc. They construct the type and quality of the individual’s interactions with family members, which may result in different image of relationships they create. Therefore, both the child and individual family members (siblings, parents) are particularly vulnerable to negative experiences. For a number of teachers, a hyperactive student constitutes a significant part of their professional and personal space. Professional, since the symptoms of ADHD influence considerably the process and organization of education, and they require adapting the work forms and methods to the child’s abilities. Personal, as the work with a child with difficulties in question is frequently accompanied by anger, irritation, nervousness and helplessness. Moreover, teachers and parents of a hyperactive child are frequently in conflict, accusing each other, for instance, of using inappropriate work methods and incomprehension of the problem, revealing in this way their helplessness in the face of the child’s difficulties. School and family environments interact, and a change of one of the elements influences the rest of them. School – Teachers – Family – ADHD 73 List of authors and co-authors Hußmann, Stephan p. 36 Ingber, Sara p. 64 Kaufmann, Liane p. 25 Klieme, Eckhard p. 70 Kolkman, Meijke E p. 65 Kroesbergen, Evelyn H. pp. 24, 28, 65 Kuhl, Jan p. 57 Kunter, Mareike p. 70 Kypriotaki, Maria pp. 42, 69 Labuhn, Andju Sara. p. 54 Lanfranchi, Andrea p. 43 Läzer, Luise p. 44 Lehmann, Martin p. 46 Leuzinger-Bohleber, Marianne p. 44 Linardakis, Michalis p. 69 Lindberg, Sven pp. 33, 50 Lühken, Arnim p. 70 Machado, Ricardo p. 31 Mannel, Susanne p. 70 Manolitsis, George p. 42 Mähler, Claudia p. 45 Malstädt, Nadine p. 46 Mann, Wolfgang p. 47 Markodimitraki, Maria p. 69 Marshall, Chloe p. 47 Matull, Ina p. 36 Melro, Joaquim p. 47 Messer, David p. 40 Miller, Erez C. p. 35 Moeller, Korbinian p. 25 Moscardini, Lio p. 47 Moser Opitz, Elisabeth p. 36 Müller, Christoph Michael p. 31 Nagler, Telse pp. 33, 50 Nash, Gilly p. 40 Naumann, Alexander p. 70 Nuerk, Hans-Christoph p. 25 Nußbeck, Susanne p. 31 Parsons, Sarah p. 16 Adl-Amini, Katja p. 70 Al-Yagon, Michal p. 64 Ampartzaki, Maria p. 69 Audeoud, Mireille p. 22 Avila, Vicenta p. 34 Bilimória, Helena p. 71 Boonen, Anton J.H. p. 65 Borges, Inês p. 1 Brankaer, Carmen p. 27 Büttner, Gerhard pp. 53, 70 César, Margarida pp. 1, 31, 56, 59, 47 De Smedt, Bert p. 27 Djakovic, Sanna-K. p. 70 Eberhardt, Melanie p. 31 Eden, Segal p. 17 Ehm, Jan-Henning p. 33 Fajardo, Inmaculada p. 34 Fauth, Benjamin p. 70 Ferrer, Antonio p. 34 Fleischmann, Amos p. 35 Frangogianni, Maria - Efterpi p. 66 Freesemann, Okka p. 36 Garib-Penna, Sara p. 16 Ghedin, Elisabetta p. 55 Ghesquière, Pol p. 27 Grosche, Michael p. 37 Groß, Johannes p. 66 Grünke, Matthias p. 14, 37, 62, 68 Haefeli, Kurt p. 38 Hardy, Ilonca p. 70 Hasselhorn, Marcus pp. 33, 46, 50, 53 Haug, Tobias p. 39 Henry, Lucy A. p. 40 Hertel, Silke p. 70 Hessels, Marco G.P. p. 41 Hetzroni, Orit p. 15 Hofmann, Claudia p. 38 Hohn, Katharina p. 66 Hondrich, Lena p. 70 74 Pelgrims, Greta Pfenning, Nicole Passolunghi, Maria Chiara Pixner, Silvia Plutecka, Catherine Poloczek, Sebastian Prediger, Susanne Rasch, Renate Rietz, Chantal S. Rojas, Hildalill Santi, Marina Santos, Joel Santos, Nuno Scherndl, Thomas Schuchardt, Kirsten Shamir, Adina Shlafer, Inessa Silva, Ana Schnotz, Wolfgang Sinner, Daniel Tannous, Juman Tarnutzer, Rupert Tavares, Gema Telli, Siebel Toll, Sylke W. M. van der Aalsvoort, G.M. Vanderlinden, Katia Van der Ven, Sanne H. G. van Loo, Floor Van Luit, Johannes E. H. Venetz, Martin Warwas, Jasmin Ventura, Cláudia Wertli, Emanuela Wettstein, Alexander Wilbert, Jürgen Woerner, Wolfgang. Wójcik, Anna Wood, Guilherme Zurbriggen, Carmen pp. 51, 52 p. 44 p. 26 p. 25 p. 70 p. 53 p. 36 p. 66 p. 54 p. 41 p. 55 p. 56 p. 59 p. 25 p. 45 pp. 14, 18 p. 18 p. 71 p. 66 p. 57 p. 15 p. 21 p. 34 p. 66 p. 28 p. 58 p. 41 p. 28 p. 58 p. 28 pp. 14, 20 p. 70 p. 59 p. 22 pp. 60, 61 p. 62, 68 p. 54 p. 73 p. 25 p. 23 75