SPECIAL NEEDS IN INITIAL TEACHER-TRAINING - COURSE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION IN AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY

It is this sequence of development and related research which is reported here. Over a period of four years the special needs input to one university Postgraduate Certificate in Education one-year course was successively modified and evaluated. The aims of the changes were to make the students involved in these initial training courses more aware of special needs issues and to give them skills and strategies to deal with the most common difficulties with respect to the pupils’ learning and behaviour in their own classes. The evaluation of each year’s course was carried out to gain insights into the impact of different approaches to the presentation of special needs material and to guide the later phases of the course development. © 1990, Taylor … Francis Group. All rights reserved.