BASES & POLICIES OF

SPECIAL AND INCLUSIVE

EDUCATION
________________________________________________________________________________________________
____

Module Overview:

This module talks about the bases and policies of special and inclusive education. This discusses
The Psychological bases, philosophical bases, historical and sociological, and principles, policies and
Dimensions.

Desired Learning Outcome

At the end of the unit, the pre-service teachers are expected to:

1. demonstrate understanding of the philosophies, theories, and legal bases of special and inclusive education
including its application;

2. demonstrate knowledge of policies, guidelines and procedures that provide safe and secure learning
environments for learners with special needs; and

3. demonstrate knowledge of the development of Special and Inclusive Education in the local and international
contexts by constructing a historical timeline.

Content Focus

Lesson 1: Review of Bases: Psychological Bases (October 12, 2021) Tuesday

FOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL BASES

 Piaget’s Cognitive Development: Impact of Special Needs
 Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
 LevVygotsky’s Scaffolding
  Jean Lave’s Situated Learning

PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Jan Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the 20th century’s most influential researchers in the area of
developmental psychology
 He was originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy and considered himself a “ Genetic
Epistemologist”
 Piaget wanted to know how children learned through their development in the study of knowledge
 He administered Binet’s IQ test in Paris and observed that children’s answers were qualitatively different
 Piaget’s theory is based on the idea that the developing child builds cognitive structures.

What is Cognition?
- The term cognition is derived from the Latin word “cognoscere” which means “to know” or “to recognize”
or “to conceptualize”.
- Cognition is “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought,
experience, and senses.
What is Cognitive Development?
- Is the emergence of the ability to think and understand
- The acquisition of the ability to think, reason, and problem solve
- It is the process by which people’s thinking changes across the life span
- Paiget studied cognitive development by observing children in particular, to examine how their thought
processes changed with age
- It is the growing apprehension and adaptation to the physical and social environment.
How Cognitive Development occurs?

- Cognitive development is gradual and orderly changes by which mental process becomes more complex
and sophisticated.
- The essential development of cognition is the establishment of new schemes
- Assimilation and Accommodation are both the processes of the ways of Cognitive Development
- The equilibration is the symbol of a new stage of the Cognitive Development

Key Concepts:
Schema: Schema is an internal representation of the world. It helps an individual understand the world they inhabit.
They are cognitive structures that represent a certain aspect of the world, and can be seen as categories which have
ceratin pre-conceived ideas in them. For example, my schema for Christmas includes: Christmas trees, presents,
giving, money, green, red, gold, winter, Santa Claus etc. Someone else may have an entirely different schema, such as
Jesus, birth, Church, holiday, Christianity

Assimilation: It is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation. Here, the learner fits the new idea
into what he already knows. In assimilation, the schema is not changed, it is only modified. Example: A 2 year old child
sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler’s
shouts “Clown, clown”.
Accommodation: This happens when the existing schema {Knowledge} does not work and needs to be changed to
deal with a new object or situation. In accommodation, the schema is altered, a new schema may be developed.
Example: In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even
though his hair was like a clown’s, he was not wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people
laugh.
Equilibration: Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and
bounds. Equilibrium occurs when a child’s schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. As a
child progresses through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying
previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior o account for new knowledge (accommodation).
Equilibrium helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought to the next.

THE FOUR STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years)

 Infancy
 Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (seeing, hearing) with
motor actions (reaching, touching)
 Develop object Performance (memory)- Realize that objects exist even if they are out of sight.
 Infants progress from reflexive, instinctual actions at birth to the beginning of problem solving (intellectual_
and symbolic abilities (language) toward the end of his stage.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

o Toddler and Early Childhood
 This stage begins when the child starts to use symbols and language. This is a period of developing language
and concepts. So, the child is capable of more complex mental representation ( i.e words and images). He is still
unable to use “operations”. i.e logical mental rules, such as rules of arithmetic. This is further divided into 2
sub-stages.
 Preconceptual stage (2-4 yrs): Increased use of verbal representation but speech is egocentric. The child uses
sysmbols to stand for actions; a toy doll stands for a real baby or the child role plays mummy or daddy.
  Intuitive stage (4-7 yrs): Speech becomes more social, less egocentric. Here, the child based their knowledge on
what they feel or sense to be true, yet they cannot explain the underlying principles behind what they feel or
sense.

The following are the key features of this stage:

 Egocentrism: The child’s thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e about themselves or their
own point of view). Eg. “if I can’t see the world from anyone else’s eyes, it is well explained by Piaget as Three
Mountain Task
 Animism: Treating inanimate objects as living ones. Eg: children dressing and feeding their dolls as if they are
alive.
 Concentration: The process of concentrating on one limited aspects of a stimulus and ignoring other aspects. It
is noticed in Conservation. It is on the other hand the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement
and physical appearance of objects. Children at this stage are unaware of the conservation.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-12 yrs)

o Childhood and Early Adolescence
The concrete operational stage is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage
are:
 Seriation: The ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape or any other characteristics. Eg; given
different sized objects, they may place them accordingly.
 Transitivity: The ability to recognize logical relationships among elements in a serial order. Eg; if A is taller
than B and B and B is taller than C, then A must be taller than C.
 Classification: the ability to group objetcts together on the basis of common features. The child also begins to
get the idea that one se can include another. Eg; there is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class
called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals include that of dogs.
 Decentring: The ability to take multiple aspects of a situation into account. Eg.: the child will no longer
perceive an exceptionally-wide but short cup to contain less than a normally-wide, taller cup.
 Reversibility: The child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their state. Eg.:
the child will rapidly determine that 4+4=8 then 8-4=4, the original quantity.
 Conservation: Understanding that the quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or
appearance of the object or item.
 Elimination of Egocentrism: The ability to view things from another’s perspective.
 The child performs operations: combining, separating, multiplying, repeating and dividing.
 Formal Operational Stage (12 yrs and above)
o Adolescence and Adulthood

-The thought becomes increasingly flexible and abstract, i.e can carry out systematic experiments
-The ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodological way.
- Understands that nothing is absolute; everything is relative
-Develops skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning as well as inductive reasoning and systematic planning
etc.
-understand that the rules of any game or social system are developed by a man by mutual agreement and hence could
be changed and modified
-The child’s way of thinking is at its most advanced, although the knowledge it has to work with, will change.

Educational Implications
1. Emphasizes on discovery approach in learning
2. Curriculum should provide specific educational experience based on children’s developmental level
3. Arrange classroom activities so that they assist and encourage self-learning
4. Social interactions have a great educational value for Piaget. Positive social actions, therefore
should be encouraged.
5. Instructions have a great educational value for Piaget. Positive social actions, therefore should be
encouraged.
6. Simple to complex and project method of teaching
7. Co-curriculum activities have equal importance as that of curricular experiences in the cognitive
development of children.
8. The major goal of education according to Piaget are critical and creative thinking.

Contribution to Education
1. Piaget’s theory helped educators, parents and investigators to comprehend the capacity of children in their different
stages.
2. He made us conscious with the way children and adults think
3. A lot of school programs have been redesigned taking as base Piaget’s discoveries
4. Piaget’s made revolution with the developmental psychological concentrating all his attention to the mental process
and hi role with behavior
 SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY
Albert Bandura

October 15, 2021- Thursday

What is Social Learning Theory?

 Also called observational learning
 Theory that emphasizes learning through observation of others
 We learn not only to perform a behavior but also what will happen to us in a specific situation if we do perform
it

Types of Observational Learning Effects

Inhibition- to learn not to do something that we already know how to do because a model being observed
refrains from behaving in that way or does something different from what is intended to be done
Disinhibition- to learn to exhibit a behavior that is usually disapproved of by most people because a
model does the same without being punished
Facilitation- to be prompted to do something that is not ordinarily done because of insufficient
motivation.
Observational learning- to learn a new behavior pattern by watching and imitating the performance of
someone else.

Elements of Observational Learning

1. Attention
> mental focus or concentration
> willingness of the child to observe and mimic the behavior or a model
2. Retention
> to encode the behavior in the memory
>ability to store information
3. Production
> to actually perform the behavior observed
4. Motivation/Reinforcement
> force that drives one to act
 SCAFFOLDING AND ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
Lev Vygotsky’s Scaffolding

SCAFFOLDING
 Refers to providing contextual supports for meaning through the use of simplified language, teacher modeling,
visuals and graphics, cooperative learning and hands-on learning
 Is the way the adult guides the child’s learning via focused questions and positive interaction.

THEORY OF SCAFFOLDING
 Was first introduced in the late 1950s by Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist. He used the term to describe
young children’s oral language acquisition. Helped by their parents when they first start learning to speak,
young children are provided with informal instructional formats within which their learning is facilitated. Bed-
time stories and read aloud are additional examples of boo-centered interaction.

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT (ZPD)

 Often abbreviated as ZPD, is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can
do with help. It is a concept introduced, yet not fully developed, by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygostsky (1896-
1934) during the last ten years of his life
 The zone of proximal development is an area of learning that occurs when a person is assisted by a teacher or
peer with a higher skill set of the subject. The person learning the skill set cannot complete it without the
assistance of the teacher or peer.

TYPES OF SCAFFOLDING
Three types of scaffolding have been identified as being especially effective for second language learners
1. Simplifying the language: The teacher can simplify the language by shortening selections, speaking in the present
tense, and avoiding the use of idioms
2. Asking for completion, not generation: The teacher can have students choose answers from a list or complete a
partially finished outline or paragraph
3. Using visuals: The teacher can present information and ask for students to respond through the use of graphic
organizers, tables, chart, outlines, and graphs.
ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF SCAFFOLDING
1. The first has to do with the interaction between the learner and the expert
2. The second, learning should take place in the learners’ zone of proximal development
3. The third feature of scaffolding is that the scaffold, the support and guidance provided by the expert, is gradually
removed as a learner becomes more proficient

Vygotsky’s Hypothesis
Vygotsky’s hypothesis consists of two features
1. First, it suggests that developmental processes do not coincide with learning processes, but instead, developmental
processes lags behind learning, resulting in zones of proximal development
2. the second feature suggests that although learning directly relates to child development, the two are never
accomplished at the same time, as there is highly complex dynamic relationship between development and learning.

SITUATED LEARNING THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY

October 26, 2021- Tuesday

WHAT IS SITUATED LEARNING?

 Is an instructional approach developed by Jean Lava and Etienne Wenger in the early 1990s, and follows the
work of Dewey, Vygotsky, and others who claim that students are more inclined to learned by actively
participating in the learning experiences.

EXAMPLES OF SITUATED LEARNING ACTIVITIES:

 Field trips where students actively participate in an unfamiliar environment

 Cooperative education and internship experiences in which students are immersed and physically active in an
actual work environment.

TRADITIONAL VS SITUATED
 Traditional learning occurs from abstract out of context experiences such as lectures and books
 Situated learning, on the other hand, suggests that learning takes place through the relationships between people
and connecting prior knowledge with authentic, informal, and often unintended contextual learning.
EXAMPLES OF SITUATED LEARNING AN TECHNOLOGY
 The act of writing in a Weblog, or “blogging” can go a long way toward teaching skills such as research,
organizations and the synthesis of ideas.
 Social networks like Facebook, Twitter allow learners, once they move beyond the personal connections, to
embrace a community where they can learn from each other.
 Students are able to mimic what they see and hear which enables them to retain information for the long term
 Through visualizations of different types of computer applications, the student’s knowledge is defined by the
social process of interacting and doing.
 It allows students to learn naturally as a result of social behavior. The computer application acts as a guide
while the students learn naturally from their own experiences. As always, situated learning accelerates a student
learning process and ability.

CONCLUSION
 Situated learning approach focuses on developing skills that will be helpful for learnes in a real context,
students need to engage and create products, all this through collaborative work, research, hands-on activities
and experiences.

THESE ARE THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASES FOR A SUCCESFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF SPECIAL AND
INCLUSIVE EDUCATION

Prepared by:

VINCENT ANTHONY P. ISAO, MAED

Part-time Lecturer

REFERENCE

A. Books

Bilbao, P., Corpuz, B., Llagas, A., and Salandanan, G. The teaching Profession Fourth Edition. Cubao, Quezon City:
LORIMAR Publishing

B. Electronic Sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyUu2K1ZJwI
.