In 2005, the Royal College of Psychiatry Faculty of Learning Disability's three judges unanimously awarded the inaugural Medical Student Essay Prize to Ian Harwood, a mature medical student at Barts & The London School of Medicine. This reflective piece records an undergraduate's contact with an adolescent suffering from advanced Sanfillipo…

The education of young people with profound and multiple learning difficulties continues to raise challenges and controversies. In this article, Ben Simmons, an ESRC funded PhD student and research assistant, and Phil Bayliss, programme director for the masters degree in special education and disability, both based in the School of Education and…

There have been many research projects studying the use of peer intervention strategies to develop the social, communication and interaction skills of children with autism, yet few of these studies focus in detail on the impact of such strategies on the mainstream peers. In this article, Val Jones, an advisory teacher for autism spectrum…

Based on the data of the normative study of the "Hong Kong test of specific learning difficulties in reading and writing," and the "Test of visual-perceptual skills (non-motor)-Revised," 99 children aged between 6 and 10 1/2 years were identified as children with dyslexia out of the normative sample of 690 children. By…

How specialized is the teaching of the group of learners with disabilities and difficulties? This is one of the most basic and perplexing questions in the education of this group. This is a highly significant question in the context of current education policy and practice. There has been a growing awareness of the need for universalizing…

The Brief Academic Competence Evaluation Screening System (BACESS; Elliott, DiPerna, & Huai, 2003) is a multi-phase instrument designed to assist educators in the identification of students who are likely to experience early learning problems. The BACESS was used in eight elementary classrooms (n=71) in southern California. Each phase of the…

In this contribution we describe a short development course for in-service physics teachers. The course structure and materials are based on the results of educational research, and its main objective is to provide in-service teachers with a first contact with the active learning strategy "Tutorials in Introductory Physics," developed by…

We describe a workshop in which 10 teachers from 10 schools, located in central Israel, participated in the development of alternative assessment tools in the context of implementing a new science curriculum for senior high-school students, namely "Science for All" (an STS type curriculum). In order to assist a group of teachers (who…

The academic achievement and social functioning of children with learning difficulties (LD) and children without LD (7-12 years old) was examined. Attainment scores in mathematics and English were obtained for each child, and a sample of children without LD was further classified as low achieving (LA) or high achieving (HA) on the basis of these…

This article discusses the favoritism among teachers. According to Adele Brodkin, a child psychologist, few teachers are above favoritism and this shows that teachers are just human. She advises teachers to acknowledge that they do have favorites and make sure not to treat favorites in any special way. In this article, the author presents…

This study examined whether children with mathematical difficulties (MDs) or comorbid mathematical and reading difficulties have a working memory deficit and whether the hypothesized working memory deficit includes the whole working memory system or only specific components. In the study, 31 10-year-olds with MDs and 37 10-year-olds with both…

Ms. K. has attended ABE (Adult Basic Education) classes for almost one year and has had significant difficulty in making progress in reading. She has passed some of the GED tests, but has struggled with others due to having insufficient time to complete them. She currently works as a teacher's aide in a daycare center. Her goal is to pass the GED…

Beginning foreign language (FL) courses in high school often have high numbers of learning disabled (LED) and at-risk students, perhaps because many students who are considered to be college bound begin foreign language study in middle school. This paper examines FL difficulties as well as effective strategies that others have used to conquer…

Early childhood neglect can limit a child's normal cognitive development and result in behavior problems in the classroom. When normal attachment is disrupted, learning difficulties can result in problems with time awareness. It has also been shown that an awareness of time is a key concept for the formation of organizational and math skills. This…

Maintaining therapeutic programmes for people with learning disabilities over long periods of time presents a major challenge to care systems as the limited and slow pace of client behavioural change is often insufficient to sustain staff behaviour. In this study, a 17-year-old young man with profound learning difficulties was successfully…