Abstract:

Inclusion in education is an essential human right for all children and young persons. The principle of inclusive education was employed for the first time at the Salamanca World Conference on Special Needs Education (SEN), where inclusive education means that: “….School should accept all children without considering their physical, intellectual, emotional, linguistic or other condition, including disabled and gifted children, street and working children, children from remote or nomadic population, children from linguistic, ethnic or cultural minorities and children coming from other disadvantaged or marginalized areas or groups.

In Italy there’s an increasing number of children being labelled as having “special needs”. Particularly children from ethnic minorities or socio-economically less favourable circumstances are at risk of underachieving and early exclusion from educational system, preventing them from successful educational chances. Children with SEN are regularly tested all their lives. Thus it seems as if life-long testing prevails over life-long learning. According to the test results, decisions are made concerning special needs provisions, help, curricula, therapy, work, income, etc.

Testing often starts early in life; this takes place as soon as deviation from the standard is suspected. The impact of testing is extremely high: it may be directed towards diagnosis of medical underlying etiology, developmental profile, neuropsychological functioning and learning performance. But it cannot adjust the learning problem at school, nor can support teacher in the classroom, and above all help students to become part of the class.

This study aims at going through and studying the effects of a mediated intervention program that was carried out in a primary school. This program regarded 120 students aged 8-9, attending the 3rd class, half of them Italian and half immigrants of first or second generation. Some of their teachers joined as mentors.

The tasks were focused on the participants’ cognitive enhancement through Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment, and on a task concerning the body awareness and mediated learning experience. The Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment Program (FIE) is a series of activities concentrating directly on the development of thinking skills. The implementation of the instruments effectively needs a distinct teaching style called Mediated Learning Experience (MLE). The intention is to improve students’ social adaptability that ultimately contributes towards real- life problem solving skills. The Enrichment Program is developed on the idea according to which intelligence is dynamic and modifiable and not static or fixed. Thus, the program tries to sharpen critical thinking with concepts, skills, strategies, operations, and techniques necessary for autonomous learning. It is an instrument to identify and improve deficiencies in thinking skills, in addition to helping students to learn how to learn. The task content is specially designed to foster autonomous thinking in the learner. As there are limited studies on learners in remedial schools, this study intended to assume that students exposed to mediation would get a significant improvement in cognitive functioning.

A pre-experimental research design: particularly it was adopted a one-group pre-test-post-test approach.

Keywords:

Competence, Skills, capabilities, Mediated Learning Experience.