The Student with Complex Education Needs

Categories of potential research questions concerning trends and issues affecting the education of students with complex educational needs are numerous. For example, it seems that whether one studies musicians and their music, the processes of music, the performer, the composer, or the teacher-researcher, music is often observed as implicated in and determinants of the ways individuals are able to be intelligent. The chapter reports the findings of a research project during which a ten-week music program was developed and implemented in a public special education setting in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia (Farrell, 2007). The program featured the application of information and computer technology and assistive peripherals for a defined classroom grouping of students with complex educational needs that embedded notions of differentiated instruction. Like special education settings and classroom groupings of students with complex educational needs are observed within and across education systems of many sovereign states. However, from an Australian perspective, findings and conclusions suggest future directions in the application of assistive and augmentative information and communication technology for students with complex educational needs.

Within-classroom grouping: a rejoinder

Let us briefly remind ourselves of the current policy-context of this issue in Britain. The need to raise children's schooling attainments to a very substantial extent has become widely accepted in the past fifteen years following international comparisons (many based on research at this Institute) of workforce vocational qualifications and school-leaving standards. The consequences are expressed today in interventionist public policy in terms of a National Curriculum laid down for all school-ages (adopted ten years ago), together with more recent detailed syllabuses in the core subjects of language and mathematics embodied in the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies for primary schools (adopted in the past two years). Much of the need for such reforms in Britain can be traced to worries as to whether teaching time was well spent, particularly in primary schools using ‘modern’ teaching methods which required children within each classroom to be divided into small groups, each group sitting around its own small table, many children not facing the wall-board (many classrooms even having their wall-board removed) so as to promote less ‘didactic’ teaching and more ‘discovery’ learning by pupils. The frequently ensuing difficulties of teachers in dividing their time effectively among those groups, the consequential frustration of those children who awaited the teacher's attention, the slower general pace of learning, and the particular disadvantages suffered by slower-developing children, need not be spelled out here; they have been closely examined in research involving timed classroom observation, such as the ‘Oracle’ project of Professor Maurice Galton and his colleagues.

In the classroom: Grouping—an aid in learning multiplication and division facts

As elementary-school children progress in their study of mathematics, they deal with numbers which are increasingly more complex and abstract. Around the third or fourth year in the grades, children's work with operations requires an understanding of numbers of two or more places and a knowledge of regrouping in terms of our basic unit of ten. Attention to grouping arrangements assists children in their discovery of multiplication and division facts, and it assists them in the use of these facts in the operations of multiplication and division.