Severely inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive children fall behind their peers and can be difficult for teachers. What impact do screening and/or advice have? Interventions were randomly assigned to 2040 schools and 24 local education authorities in England. School-level interventions involved naming pupils with ADHD-like behaviour, or providing…

In the past ten years, the issue of inclusion has proved one of the biggest challenges facing special needs education planners and policy-makers in developed countries. Greek educational policy has given emphasis on two points: (a) the development of new organizational structures (i.e. resource rooms, support teachers), and (b) the implementation…

A multiple case study is reported aiming at comparing the degree of taking part and being engaged in classroom activities for children with and without reading and writing difficulties. Observations are made of 23 pupils with reading and writing difficulties (seven with a diagnosis of dyslexia), and 23 pupils in a control group; the observations…

This study is aimed at the mechanisms used by students with an intellectual disability in the counting process. The assessment of the counting process is carried out through experimental tests inspired by the basic principles of Gelman and Gallistel, namely one-to-one, stable order, cardinality, abstraction and order irrelevance. This is a…

This study was designed to elicit the views and preferences of primary education students with general learning difficulties concerning different service delivery modes. The main areas to be investigated were: (a) their current educational provision, (b) alternative modes of provision and (c) the most appropriate provider (mainstream or special…

This paper examines recent historical, social and economic factors in Albania and Serbia, identifying similarities and differences that have a bearing on the provision of education. The focus is on the education of children with difficulties in learning and/or disabilities (the term "special needs" is used for brevity). The paper provides a…

In this paper, we try to examine the classical sociological points of special education, especially the organizational form of special education, social background of students and the minority status of students. The material of the study was collected mostly during 2003 from one large city in Finland. This city has more than a 100-year-long…

This paper seeks to obtain the views of student teachers in Northern Ireland as to the benefits and challenges of inclusive education and the key issues that may need to be addressed to ensure they become effective teachers in an inclusive classroom. Because of the system of academic selection that has prevailed in Northern Ireland, issues…

Academic self-concept and academic interest are crucial concepts for understanding students' academic achievement. Yet, few questionnaires currently exist that have been used and validated in more than one country. This study aimed at assessing these concepts using an academic self-concept questionnaire (Marsh, 1990) and an academic interest…

The claim that writing facilitates students' learning, although widely accepted, has little support from empirical research. A possible explanation for the lack of empirical evidence is that writing-to-learn research has disregarded that students use different writing strategies. The purpose of the present experimental study is to test whether it…

In this study we examined how good and weak students of literature interact with short literary stories. We focused on differences in the use of cognitive and affective reading activities, and in the extent to which good and weak students adapt their activities to (parts of) the story they are reading. 19 Dutch tenth-grade students from 8 classes…

The present study examined the relationship between goal orientation, coping with school failure and school achievement. Two questionnaires. Goal Orientation (Niemivirta, 1996a) and The School Failure Coping Scale (Rijavec & Brdar, 1997), were administered to 1057 high school students (aged from 15 to 17 years). The first goal of this study was to…

Instructional designs, embedding learning in meaningful contexts such as problem-based learning (PBL) are increasingly used for fostering expertise to prepare students for the demands of the future workplace. However, cognitive outcomes of these curricula in terms of expertise outcomes are not always conclusive. Based on the instructional…

This paper examines evaluation in reading. Evaluation refers to the processes by which readers monitor their ongoing text comprehension to assess performance and task difficulties. Monitoring is assumed to explain a large proportion of individual differences in text comprehension, in that individuals need to be aware of their objectives and…

This research aimed at exploring the motivation for reading of pupils with dyslexia, and to investigate whether they differ from their peers. A total of 32 pupils formed the LD group (22 boys and 10 girls, 5th- and 6th-graders) who were diagnosed with dyslexia. A comparison group was formed of pupils who attended the same classes (N = 210), and…