Suchergebnisse

AbstractIs taking the arm of a woman with an intellectual and developmental disability (I/DD) and pulling her along in order to carry out a routine domestic task an abusive practice? In spite of the existence of some approved definitions, the interpretation of the situation observed may lead to different opinions about what is considered abuse. With this in mind, the authors compare social and legal points of view via an exploratory study. A vignette was submitted to a legal adviser, two groups of parents of people with I/DD (n = 11 and n = 7) and two groups of direct‐care professionals (n = 12 and n = 11). The vignette portrayed a realistic scenario in which a care professional, bristling with impatience at the slow pace of activity of a middle‐aged woman with I/DD, urges her—in what may or may not appear to be an excessively forceful manner—to attend to a task. The corpus is composed of the legal adviser's analysis, data from the focus group and questionnaires filled out by the focus group participants. The legal analysis concludes that although they are not trivial, it is quite unlikely that the facts subjected for review would lead to legal proceedings. On the other hand, from the social perspective, both the parents and direct‐care professionals saw the actions as an unacceptable infringement and a violation. The authors address the risk of the legal system only being concerned with more extreme "caregiving" practices. The application of a case study approach showed the usefulness of looking at "borderline" situations that are not actually covered by existing laws. The results indicate the need for more pronounced action, specifically in devising professional codes of practice.

In a first step, we conducted a study that aimed to describe special education teachers' current reading instruction practices in self-contained classrooms for elementary school students with intellectual disability, as well as to identify the main ressources and obstacles that they face.

In a second step, we created a research-based phonics-based reading program in French to help these teachers to teach reading skills to their students more effectively. We pre-tested this reading program in four classrooms, and improved it thanks to the feedbacks of the teachers that implemented it during several months and the researchers' observations of lessons.

In a third step, we conducted a study with pre-test and post-test and random allocation of the participants in a treatment group and control group to assess the effect of our phonics-based reading program on the reading skills of students with intellectual disability.