Promoting Learning in Children with Difficulties

Aims

The project has two phases:

• Phase 1: the development of a profile of abilities of 70 children with Moderate Learning Difficulties (MLD). This provided a baseline from which to measure the effects of Phase 2.
• Phase 2: an intervention study designed to promote self-regulatory skills through structured communication activities and story re-telling.

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Theoretical Background

The theory behind the research comes primarily from Vygotsky's proposals about co-operative activity providing the opportunity for children to begin to regulate their own learning. We propose that children with learning difficulties lack specific skills in self-regulation which result from and lead to language and communication difficulties . By improving children's language and communication abilities, we expected to facilitate self-regulatory skills which would be reflected in enhanced communication and educational performance.

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Phase 1: Profile of Abilities

• Assessments of 70 children with MLDs enabled us to build a model of the relationships between biographic factors and aspects of academic achievement.
• The model demonstrated a direct relationship between communication skill and IQ and an indirect relationship between communication and reading, mediated by intelligence.

• Assuming this is an accurate representation, then we would expect that any improvements in communication brought about by an intervention should result in gains in both reading and IQ.

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Phase 2: Intervention

The intervention programme consisted of two strands:

• The communication skills strand comprised twelve weekly sessions. During each session pairs of children worked together at a communication game. The children were supported in their use of self-regulatory strategies.
• During the narrative strand the children watched one episode of a television drama each week which they subsequently re-told individually.

Assessments were made before and after the intervention in communication, reading accuracy, reading comprehension and IQ. Changes in communication skill would serve as the preliminary indicator of the success of the intervention programme. We were also interested in whether gains were made on any of the other measures.

Results

• The communication skills of half the children improved over the course of the intervention.
• Those children who improved were those who were initially less skilled in communication.
• The children who made gains in communication also improved in reading and IQ.
• There were no gains in these measures for the children who made no improvements in communication.

Educational Implications

Whilst we must not overlook the fact that half the children in the study failed to make gains, the fact that for the other children improvements were observed in various areas of cognitive functioning is encouraging. Since there was no direct instruction in reading per se, the findings support the claim that learning is improved when children are encourage to plan, monitor and reflect on their own and each other's behaviour. The study highlights the benefits of teaching children strategies for learning through the language and communication activities.

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On-going Research

Current research addresses the finding that the intervention was successful for only half the children. These findings could indicate that:

• the demands of the intervention programme were not sufficiently great to stretch the more able children or
• the more able children provided effective models for the less able but were not themselves exposed to models which helped them to discover new strategies of learning.

The cognitive and linguistic abilities of the children are also being analysed in detail.

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Selected Publications

Bibby, P., Lamb, S., Leyden, G. & Wood, D. (1995) Season of birth and gender effects in children attending moderate learning difficulty schools. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 66 (2), 159-168.

Lamb, S.J. (1996) Supporting children's communication: activities used as part of the language and communication project. Technical Report No. 38. ESRC Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training, University of Nottingham.

Lamb, S. Bibby, P., Wood, D. & Leyden, G. (in press) Biographic characteristics and aspects of educational achievement of children with moderate learning difficulties. European Journal of Psychology in Education.

Lamb, S.J. & Wood, D.J. (1994) Peer interaction and communication skills in children with moderate learning difficulties. In Foot, H.C., Howe, C.J., Anderson, A., Tolmie, A. K. & Warden D.A. (Eds). Group and Interactive Learning. Computational Mechanics Publications, Southampton.