M.H.J. Peeters

Importance of speech production for phonological awareness and word decoding: the case of children with cerebral palsy.

The goal of this longitudinal study was to investigate the precursors of early reading development in 52 children with cerebral palsy at kindergarten level in comparison to 65 children without disabilities. Word Decoding was measured to investigate early reading skills, while Phonological Awareness, Phonological Short-term Memory (STM), Speech Perception, Speech Production and Nonverbal Reasoning were considered reading precursors. Children with cerebral palsy lag behind on all reading precursors at the beginning of the second year of kindergarten. For the children without disabilities, early reading skills in Grade 1 were best predicted by Phonological Awareness and Phonological STM while Speech Production was the most important predictor of early reading success for the children with cerebral palsy, followed by Phonological Awareness and Speech Perception. Furthermore, for children with cerebral palsy, Speech Production appears to dominate reading development, as Speech Production measured at the beginning of the second year of kindergarten was strongly predictive of all other reading precursors measured at the end of the second year of kindergarten. The results of this study reveal that children with cerebral palsy with additional speech impairments are at risk for limited literacy development. Clinical implications are discussed.

Foundations of phonological awareness in pre‐school children with cerebral palsy: the impact of intellectual disability

BACKGROUND Children with cerebral palsy (CP) and accompanying disabilities are prone to reading difficulties. The aim of the present study was to examine the foundations of phonological awareness in pre-school children with CP in comparison with a normally developing control group. Rhyme perception was regarded as an early indicator of phonological awareness, whereas non-verbal reasoning, speech ability, auditory perception, auditory short-term memory and vocabulary were regarded as foundation measures. METHODS A number of tasks were administrated to examine group differences in rhyme perception and its foundation measures. Correlations between the tasks were analysed for both groups followed by multiple regression analyses wherein rhyme perception was predicted by its foundation measures. RESULTS Children with CP scored below their normally developing peers on emergent phonological awareness and its foundation measures. Regarding the prediction of phonological awareness, non-verbal reasoning followed by pseudoword articulation, were found to predict phonological awareness, i.e. rhyme perception, in the group of children with CP. In the control group, auditory perception was a significant predictor of emergent phonological awareness. The CP group was further split up into two groups according to the childrens non-verbal reasoning skills, i.e. general IQ. The below-average IQ group scored below the average IQ group on phonological awareness and on most foundation measures. In addition, the average IQ group of the children with CP scored lower than the control group. CONCLUSION The results of this study indicate that general intelligence and speech ability (i.e. pseudoword articulation) can be seen as important facilitators of emergent phonological awareness in children with CP. These findings support the role of intelligence in the emergence of phonological awareness in children with CP. Children with CP with intellectual disabilities seem to have a disadvantage in acquiring phonological awareness, especially when their speech abilities are also impaired. However, general intelligence is not enough to predict phonological awareness as other foundation measures are also important for phonological awareness independent of general intelligence.

Home literacy environment of pre‐school children with intellectual disabilities

BACKGROUND For pre-school children, the home literacy environment (HLE) plays an important role in the development of language and literacy skills. As there is little known about the HLE of children with intellectual disabilities (ID), the aim of the present study was to investigate the HLE of children with ID in comparison with children without disabilities. METHOD Parent questionnaires concerning aspects of the HLE were used to investigate differences between 48 children with ID, 107 children without disabilities of the same chronological age and 36 children without disabilities of the same mental age (MA). Furthermore, for the children with ID, correlations were computed between aspects of the HLE and childrens non-verbal intelligence, speech intelligibility, language and early literacy skills. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS From the results of the multivariate analyses of variance it could be concluded that the HLE of children with ID differed from that of children in the chronological age group on almost all aspects. When compared with children in the MA group, differences in the HLE remained. However, differences mainly concerned child-initiated activities and not parent-initiated activities. Correlation analyses showed that childrens activities with literacy materials were positively related with MA, productive syntax and vocabulary age, and book orientation skills. Also, childrens involvement during storybook reading was related with their MA, receptive language age, productive syntax and vocabulary age, book orientation and rapid naming of pictures. The amount of literacy materials parents provided was related to a higher productive syntax age and level of book orientation of the children. Parent play activities were also positively related to childrens speech intelligibility. The cognitive disabilities of the children were the main cause of the differences found in the HLE between children with ID and children without disabilities. Parents also adapt their level to the developmental level of their child, which may not always be the most stimulating for the children.

Home Literacy Predictors of Early Reading Development in Children with Cerebral Palsy.

The goal of the present 1-year long longitudinal study was to determine which home literacy variables were effective in stimulating early reading skills of children with cerebral palsy (CP) directly or indirectly via the reading precursors. Parents of 35 children with CP completed questionnaires regarding aspects of the home literacy environment (HLE). The reading precursors: Vocabulary, Syntactic skills and phonological awareness, i.e., Rhyme and Phonemic awareness, were assessed at the end of Kindergarten and the end of Grade 1, while the early reading skills Letter knowledge and Word recognition were assessed only at the end of Grade 1. Three HLE variables were found to be related to reading precursors and early reading skills: Parent literacy mediation, Word orientation and Story orientation activities during shared book reading. Path analyses showed that these three HLE variables were not directly related to early reading skills in Grade 1, but indirectly via the reading precursors, in particular phonological awareness.

Emergent Literacy Activities, Instructional Adaptations and School Absence of Children with Cerebral Palsy in Special Education.

The goal of the present study was to get an overview of the emergent literacy activities, instructional adaptations and school absence of children with cerebral palsy (CP) compared to normally developing peers. The results showed that there were differences between the groups regarding the amount of emergent literacy instruction. While time dedicated to storybook reading and independent picture-book reading was comparable, the children with CP received fewer opportunities to work with educational software and more time was dedicated to rhyming games and singing. For the children with CP, the level of speech, intellectual, and physical impairments were all related to the amount of time in emergent literacy instruction. Additionally, the amount of time reading precursors is trained and the number of specific reading precursors that is trained is all related to skills of emergent literacy.

Home literacy environment: characteristics of children with cerebral palsy

BACKGROUND Various aspects of the home literacy environment are considered to stimulate the emergent literacy development in children without disabilities. It is important to gain insight into the home literacy environment of children with cerebral palsy given that they have been shown to have difficulty acquiring literacy skills. AIMS The aims of the present study were to investigate whether the home literacy environment of children with cerebral palsy was comparable with that of peers without disabilities and to investigate to what extent speech, fine motor, and intellectual impairments limit their home literacy experiences. METHODS & PROCEDURES Questionnaires addressed to the parents of the children were devised to investigate differences in the home literacy environment in 40 children with cerebral palsy and in 62 peers without disabilities who were comparable on chronological age, i.e., 6 years old, socio-economic status (SES) and sex. The relative influence of speech intelligibility, fine motor skills, and intelligence skills for the home literacy environment factors of children with cerebral palsy was investigated. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Only a few group differences were significant: children with cerebral palsy were less interested in participating in writing activities, and less involved in word-orientation activities during shared storybook reading. On the other hand, parents of children with cerebral palsy were doing more leisure activities with their child. The speech intelligibility scores of the children with cerebral palsy predicted the amount of emergent literacy activities they were doing with their parents, as wells as their active participation in word-related activities during storybook reading. In addition, the active participation of the child in story-related activities could be predicted by his or her fine motor skills. Furthermore, parents of the children in the comparison group often had high expectations, while parents of the children with cerebral palsy often did not know what expectations to have for their childs literacy level at the end of elementary school. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Although both groups have stimulating home literacy environments, children with cerebral palsy with speech or fine motor impairments are disadvantaged in a small number of literacy activities. Teachers and speech and language therapists can work with parents to give them suggestions on how to conduct emergent literacy activities with their child with speech impairments as well as how on to involve their child with speech and fine motor dysfunctions more actively in storybook reading activities. Furthermore, parents should be given more information about their childs language development in order the better to understand what goals are achievable so they may begin to form realistic expectations.

Inquiry-based science education: towards a pedagogical framework for primary school teachers

ABSTRACT Inquiry-based science education (IBSE) has been promoted as an inspiring way of learning science by engaging pupils in designing and conducting their own scientific investigations. For primary school teachers, the open nature of IBSE poses challenges as they often lack experience in supporting their pupils during the different phases of an open IBSE project, such as formulating a research question and designing and conducting an investigation. The current study aims to meet these challenges by presenting a pedagogical framework in which four domains of scientific knowledge are addressed in seven phases of inquiry. The framework is based on video analyses of pedagogical interventions by primary school teachers participating in open IBSE projects. Our results show that teachers can guide their pupils successfully through the process of open inquiry by explicitly addressing the conceptual, epistemic, social and/or procedural domain of scientific knowledge in the subsequent phases of inquiry. The paper concludes by suggesting further research to validate our framework and to develop a pedagogy for primary school teachers to guide their pupils through the different phases of open inquiry.

Inquiry-based science education: scaffolding pupils’ self-directed learning in open inquiry

ABSTRACT This paper describes a multiple case study on open inquiry-based learning in primary schools. During open inquiry, teachers often experience difficulties in balancing support and transferring responsibility to pupils’ own learning. To facilitate teachers in guiding open inquiry, we developed hard and soft scaffolds. The hard scaffolds consisted of documents with explanations and/or exercises regarding difficult parts of the inquiry process. The soft scaffolds included explicit references to and additional explanations of the hard scaffolds. We investigated how teacher implementation of these scaffolds contributed to pupils’ self-directed learning during open inquiry. Four classes of pupils, aged 10–11, were observed while they conducted an inquiry lesson module of about 10 lessons in their classrooms. Data were acquired via classroom observations, audio recordings, and interviews with teachers and pupils. The results show that after the introduction of the hard scaffolds by the teacher, pupils were able and willing to apply them to their investigations. Combining hard scaffolds with additional soft scaffolding promoted pupils’ scientific understanding and contributed to a shared guidance of the inquiry process by the teacher and her pupils. Our results imply that the effective use of scaffolds is an important element to be included in teacher professionalisation.

Effects of a digital learning environment on knowledge and attitude of student teachers

To develop a positive attitude towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), the actual experience of doing science is an important contributor. Just telling children that science is fun, will not do the trick, and neither will reading in books about it. However, enthusiasm of the teacher, an interesting explanation, discussion in class and designing and conducting experiments themselves, can lead to emotional involvedness, lasting memories and cognitive understanding (Van Graft & Kemmers, 2007). The teacher is the role model, and the attitude they have towards STEM and towards teaching STEM can have a lasting impact on the children’ attitude (Pell & Jarvis, 2003; Schroeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, & Lee, 2007).