Abstract:

The dynamic political and economic world-wide context leads to quick changes of local educational environment in each country. Migration of people and pandemic situation poses challenges, accompanied by the threat of excluding different groups of pupils from effective educational process. Students, presenting refugee’s and minority families often have problems with the native language of the host country. Students with low social status or low level of digital skills could not participate at equal level in the online learning process. Students with learning and / or physical disabilities, and other special educational needs are disconnected from their teachers and school facilitators.

The situation requires teachers to re-think the way they teach, integrating collaborative strategies in their learning scenarios. The aim is to include all the students, especially those in unequal position, in the equal level of quality educational process. In order to be able to accept the challenge they need additional professional development and guidelines for adding collaborative inclusive strategies, methods and techniques to their learning scenarios. In the context of globalization it is essential also to share experience, knowledge and best practices among countries.

The presented study is part of the international PLEIADE project, ERASMUS + program. The participants are from Bulgaria, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. The main goals of the project are: to develop and share a set of high-quality collaborative inclusive educational scenarios.

The process of development and selection of the most effective scenarios requires development of criteria matrix for evaluation of scenario’s inclusive potential. It should contain the main criteria providing a prerequisite for inclusion, taking into account the various factors influencing the process of exclusion from the learning process. It should support pointing out weaknesses and improvement of learning scenarios.

The present research aims to identify and assess what are the main factors for improving inclusiveness in collaborative learning scenarios for elementary and low secondary school students

The study includes several stages. The inclusion problems in schools in the four countries are collected in advance. The next step is to identify key inclusion factors. During the first stage, they are extracted, following a thorough desktop research. After development of first working set of learning scenarios by involved teachers, during the next stage, the chosen factors are adjusted by peer-review and discussions in peers and with experts. The objective is to comment and rate these scenarios based on the effect on children with cultural, linguistic and socio-economic difficulties. Finally, the analysis of the discussions, comments and revisions are mapped to the literature research results. The last part summarizes the methods for measuring the inclusiveness potential of various learning activities and presents the extracted evaluation criteria.

The article is structured as follow:
1) Introduction and context;
2) Methodology of extracting criteria for evaluation of inclusive potential of learning scenarios;
3) Analysis of the literature review;
4) Analysis of the empirical evaluation of learning scenarios;
5) Indicators for inclusive potential evaluation; and
6) Conclusions and further development.

Keywords:

Inclusive potential, collaborative learning, instructional design, evaluation criteria.