STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS IN GREEK HIGHER EDUCATION: ICTS AS A VITAL TOOL FOR INCLUSION

The present paper intends to report and analyze ongoing practices and policies with respect to the inclusion of Students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and/or disabilities into Higher Education in Greece. To achieve this goal, the researchers systematically searched the current literature sources to find out the extent to and the ways in which European priorities set by article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Inclusion of Persons with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities, have been advocated by Greek educational policy within the Higher Education context. Actually, the literature review demonstrates the existing law framework of the Greek national and local policy whose purpose is to promote the development and implementation of digitally assisted services which ought to take into consideration the needs of students with learning disabilities and comply with the international strides calling for a broader inclusive education. The results of this review showed that Greek universities have endeavored to respond successfully to the Greek legislation’s mandates and to fully address anti-discriminatory practice. However, more adjustments and decisive progress steps have to be made in relation to the curriculum and to teachers’ professional training to ensure all students’ inclusion.  Article visualizations

Role taking and knowledge building in a blended university course

Role taking is an established approach for promoting social cognition. Playing a specific role within a group could lead students to exercise collective cognitive responsibility for collaborative knowledge building. Two studies explored the relationship of role taking to participation in a blended university course. Students participated in the same knowledge-building activity over three consecutive, five-week modules and enacted four roles designed in alignment with knowledge building pedagogy (Scardamalia and Bereiter 2010). In Study 1, 59 students were distributed into groups with two conditions: students who took a role in Module 2 and students who did not take a role, using Module 1 and 3 as pre and post tests. Results showed no differences in participation in Module 1, higher levels of writing and reading for role takers in Module 2, and this pattern was sustained in Module 3. Students with the Synthesizer role were the most active in terms of writing and the second most active for reading; students with the Social Tutor role were the most active for reading. In Study 2, 143 students were divided into groups with two conditions: students who took a role in Module 1 and students who did not take a role. Content analysis revealed that role takers tended to vary their contributions more than non-role takers by proposing more problems, synthesizing the discourse, reflecting on the process and organization of activity. They also assumed appropriate responsibilities for their role: the Skeptic prioritizes questioning of content, the Synthesizer emphasizes synthesizing of content, and the Social Tutor privileges maintaining of relationships. Implications of designing role taking to foster knowledge building in university blended courses are discussed

Core and activity-specific functional participatory roles in collaborative science learning

Prior research on the significance of roles in collaborative learning has explored their impact when they are pre-assigned to group members. In this article, it is argued that focusing on assigned roles downplays the spontaneous, emergent, and interactional nature of roles in small task groups and that this focus has limited the development of generalizable frameworks aimed at understanding the impact of roles in and across collaborative learning settings. A case is built for the importance of focusing on the functional participatory roles enacted during collaborative learning and for conceptualising these roles as emergent, dynamic, and evolving in situ (first claim). Further, a flexible conceptual framework for the analysis and understanding of such roles across diverse collaborative science-learning activities is proposed, based on the assumption that during collaborative learning, both core and activity-specific roles are enacted (second claim). The core roles resemble each other across activities as they associate closely with the nature of the science discipline itself, whereas the activity-specific roles vary across activities as their emergence is dependent on the affordances, demands, and characteristics of the particular activity and environment. Data from three diverse science-learning environments, including four totally or partly student-led collaborative science activities, were scrutinized to establish the degree of empirical support for this assumption and, thereby, the conceptual usefulness of the proposed framework. The contributions of the framework for future research of collaborative science learning are discussed

Core and activity-specific functional participatory roles in collaborative science learning

Prior research on the significance of roles in collaborative learning has explored their impact when they are pre-assigned to group members. In this article, it is argued that focusing on assigned roles downplays the spontaneous, emergent, and interactional nature of roles in small task groups and that this focus has limited the development of generalizable frameworks aimed at understanding the impact of roles in and across collaborative learning settings. A case is built for the importance of focusing on the functional participatory roles enacted during collaborative learning and for conceptualising these roles as emergent, dynamic, and evolving in situ (first claim). Further, a flexible conceptual framework for the analysis and understanding of such roles across diverse collaborative science-learning activities is proposed, based on the assumption that during collaborative learning, both core and activity-specific roles are enacted (second claim). The core roles resemble each other across activities as they associate closely with the nature of the science discipline itself, whereas the activity-specific roles vary across activities as their emergence is dependent on the affordances, demands, and characteristics of the particular activity and environment. Data from three diverse science-learning environments, including four totally or partly student-led collaborative science activities, were scrutinized to establish the degree of empirical support for this assumption and, thereby, the conceptual usefulness of the proposed framework. The contributions of the framework for future research of collaborative science learning are discussed.</p

Functional participatory roles in collaborative science learning

Research on roles in collaborative learning has concentrated mainly on roles that are prescribed for students while only limited attention has been devoted to roles that emerge naturally during collaboration. To address this gap, this thesis adopted a situative approach to study the functional participatory roles that emerge spontaneously and are self-enacted by students during collaborative learning and examined the significance of such roles in collaborative learning. Three datasets on students collaborating on inquiry-based science activities in small groups made up the data for the thesis. The role analyses were based on systematic video-observations, including a detailed analysis of emergent roles from videotaped group activities and a subsequent hierarchical cluster analysis to identify student role profiles. These analyses were consolidated further with an in-depth qualitative approach. The thesis consists of three studies. Study I investigated the emergence of functional participatory roles in a computer-supported science inquiry and developed an analytical coding scheme for their analysis. Fine-grained analysis of the video data identified 17 distinct functional participatory roles self-enacted by the students and provided empirical support for the spontaneous, interactive, and dynamically evolving nature of roles in collaborative learning. Study II developed a scalable framework for analysing these emergent roles across a range of collaborative science learning environments. This flexible framework distinguishes between the core roles that resemble each other across different science learning settings and activity-specific roles that are unique to a particular context. Finally, Study III examined the relationships between group achievement and within-group configurations of role profiles. The results revealed striking differences in role configuration between higher- and lower-achieving groups. Taken together, this thesis extend existing understanding of spontaneously self-enacted roles and their significance in collaborative science learning and consolidate methodology in this area.Funktionaaliset osallistumisen roolit luonnontieteiden yhteisöllisessä oppimisessa Roolien tutkimus yhteisöllisessä oppimisessa on pääosin keskittynyt opiskelijoille ennalta määriteltyihin rooleihin, kun taas yhteistyön aikana luontaisesti esiintyviä rooleja on tutkittu vain vähän. Siten tämän väitöskirjan tarkoituksena oli tutkia spontaanisti esiintyviä, opiskelijoiden itsensä omaksumia funktionaalisia osallistumisen rooleja situatiivista näkökulmaa hyödyntäen ja tarkastella näiden roolien merkitystä yhteisöllisessä oppimisessa. Tutkimusaineisto koostui kolmesta luonnontieteiden tutkivan oppimisen aineistosta, joissa opiskelijat toimivat keskenään pienryhmissä. Systemaattiseen videohavainnointiin perustuva roolien tarkastelu sisälsi funktionaalisten osallistumisen roolien yksityiskohtaisen analysoinnin videoaineistosta ja tähän analyysiin pohjautuvan hierarkkisen klusterianalyysin opiskelijoiden rooliprofiilien tunnistamiseksi. Näitä analyyseja syvennettiin laadullisella tutkimusotteella. Väitöskirja koostuu kolmesta osatutkimuksesta. Ensimmäinen tutkimus kohdistui tietokoneavusteisessa luonnontieteiden yhteisöllisessä oppimisessa esiintyvien funktionaalisten osallistumisen roolien tunnistamiseen tutkimuksessa kehitetyn analyysirungon avulla. Videoaineiston yksityiskohtaisella analysoinnilla tunnistettiin 17 erilaista opiskelijoiden omaksumaa roolia. Tutkimus vahvisti myös empiirisesti käsitystä roolien spontaanista, vuorovaikutteisesta ja dynaamisesti kehittyvästä luonteesta yhteisöllisessä oppimisessa. Toisessa osatutkimuksessa kehitettiin skaalautuva viitekehys tällaisten spontaanien roolien analysoimiseksi erilaisista luonnontieteiden yhteisöllisen oppimisen ympäristöistä. Tämä joustava viitekehys koostuu ydinrooleista, jotka ovat yhteneväisiä monien eri luonnontieteiden yhteisöllisen oppimisen ympäristöjen välillä, ja aktiviteettispesifeistä rooleista, jotka ovat omanlaisia tietylle kontekstille. Kolmannessa tutkimuksessa tutkittiin pienryhmien sisäisten rooliprofiilikokoonpanojen yhteyttä ryhmän suoritukseen. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin huomattavia eroja opiskelijoiden rooliprofiileissa paremmin ja heikommin suoriutuneiden ryhmien välillä. Väitöskirja laajentaa ymmärrystä opiskelijoiden spontaanisti omaksumista rooleista ja niiden merkityksestä luonnontieteiden yhteisöllisessä oppimisessa ja tarjoaa metodologisia edistysaskeleita tälle tutkimuskentälle

Examining Roles in Children\u27s Group Therapy: The Development of a Dramaturgical Role Instrument to Measure Group Process

In this exploratory group process study of two children’s psychotherapy groups in an outpatient clinic, group roles were examined through the development of a dramaturgical coding instrument and the use of trained raters to analyze videotaped scenes of interaction. Exploratory data analysis was conducted that compared individual members within groups, group-level data between groups, and members who showed clinical change with those who did not. The results suggest the potential diagnostic utility, for researchers and therapists, of applying dramaturgical roles to group process