Pripadnost školi posmatrana iz ugla učenika sa smetnjama u razvoju

The success of inclusive education, measured by the students' sense of belonging in school, has recently become the subject of numerous foreign research papers, while a modest number of papers on this topic can be found in our literature. Given that inclusive education has been present in our country for a decade, the aim of the research was to determine the level of the sense of belonging in a school environment of children with developmental difficulties in an inclusive environment. The sample consisted of 35 children with developmental difficulties from 11 primary schools in which inclusive education has been implemented for at least eight years. The research used the Sense of Belonging in School Scale adapted for the needs of the research with children with developmental difficulties. The results of the research obtained by the scaling technique showed that the majority of the students have a high level of the sense of belonging in their school, and no statistically significant difference was found in relation to the type of developmental difficulty. The highest degree of agreement with the statements was found in students with physical and sensory disorders, followed by students with intellectual disabilities, then disorders within the spectrum of autism, while students with behavioral difficulties agreed the least with the claims. The obtained results indicate a positive experience of students during schooling in inclusive classes.

Children's difficulty in learning homonyms

Mazzocco (1997) claimed that children have persistent difficulty in learning pseudo-homonyms – words like rope used to refer to a novel object (e.g. spade). Because the novel objects were familiar, the pseudo-homonyms in her study were also synonyms (i.e. rope and spade both now mean spade). The results could therefore be due to children's well-known difficulties in learning synonyms. In Experiment 1, 55 six- to ten-year-olds used story context to select referents for pseudo-homonyms from picture sets containing the intended referents, with primary referents amongst the distractors. Children were equally poor when the intended referents were familiar (e.g. spade) as when they were unfamiliar (e.g. tapir) – 35 and 38% correct, respectively. This indicates that familiarity of referent does not account for children's difficulties. In Experiment 2, 64 five- to ten-year-olds received instruction about homonymy, then a story set without pictures of the primary referents, in order to make the experimenter's intentions clear. Children were then shown one of the story sets from Experiment 1. Performance was just as poor (38% correct), indicating that misunderstanding of task demands did not account for failure. The conclusion is that Mazzocco's findings represent a psychologically interesting developmental difficulty.

Representation and retrieval of arithmetical facts: Developmental difficulties

One form of developmental difficulty with arithmetic affects the storage or retrieval of arithmetical facts, such as tables, which are required to implement arithmetical computations (Temple, 1991, 1994). Such difficulties may arise because of impairment in a specialized system for the storage of arithmetical facts or as a result of causally linked impairment in another cognitive domain. This study explored issues concerning the representation and retrieval of arithmetical facts in children with number fact disorders (NF) and in normal children, in particular the status of hypothesized linked impairments: short-term memory (STM) spans, counting skills, speed of speech, and speed of number fact and lexical retrieval. There was no evidence that NF children had weak STM spans on any span measure or that STM spans related to arithmetical fact skills. There was also no evidence that NF children had weak counting abilities or free counting speeds. The NF children were slower in speeded counting, which also correlated with number fact skill. The significance or not of this is discussed. The NF children were also slower than controls in speed of speech and on some measures of speed of access. However, the absence of correlation with number fact skill, the absence of generality across tasks, and the possibility that delayed speeds in fact retrieval reflect the use of alternative strategies, together suggest that the increased speeds are not causally linked to number fact skill. The results are consistent with modular accounts, in which there is a specialized system for the storage and retrieval of arithmetical facts.

To appraise developmental difficulty or mental demand, relational complexity is not enough

Two assertions of Halford et al. are critiqued: their claim of priority in relational complexity analysis and the sufficiency for cognitive development of their relational-complexity analysis of tasks. Critical discussion of concrete task analyses (i.e., the relational complexity of proportionality problems, of balance scale problems, and the Tower of Hanoi) serves, by way of counterexamples, to highlight problems in their method.

CYTOMEGALIC INCLUSION DISEASE OF THE NEWBORN

Clinical and virologic studies are reported of a patient with neonatal cytomegalic inclusion disease. Jaundice, purpura and hepatosplenomegaly were noted shortly after birth and thereafter the course during a 2-year follow-up period was primarily one of improvement. At the end of this period signs suggestive of developmental difficulty were present as evidenced by impairment of speech and a head circumference below the 3rd percentile for age. Cytomegalic virus was recovered from the urine at 2 and 5 weeks and at 3, 16, 21, and 26 months of age, suggesting that viruria was a constant feature during the period of observation. Neutralizing antibody for the virus was present in the patient's serum during the period of viruria. Recovery of cytomegalic virus from the urine during the neonatal period would appear to be a useful diagnostic procedure. However, the demonstration of viruria in the older infant does not necessarily have the same diagnostic significance.