Session 7: Education and Cognition
Raising educational outcomes for individuals with Down syndrome: Findings from a larger systematic review of targeted interventions for individuals with SEND
Jo Van Herwegen1,2, Thomas Masterman1, Julie Dockrell1, Rebecca Gordon1,2, Chloe Marshall1,2 & Michael Thomas2,3
Contact: j.vanherwegen@ucl.ac.uk
- Department of Psychology and Human Development, IOE UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, London, UK
- Centre for Educational Neuroscience, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London, UK
- Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
Educational outcomes for individuals with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), including those with Down Syndrome, often lag behind those without SEND. Targeted interventions, administered by educational professionals, following a manualised format are an effective way to narrow the gap. This systematic review focused on studies that have examined the effect of manualised interventions for diverse SEND needs, exploring variations in context and implementation through a systematic review and meta-analysis. This talk will focus on intervention studies that have evaluated what works for individuals with Down syndrome.
Using a pre-registered protocol (https://osf.io/2hy5t/), the review encompasses studies evaluating targeted interventions for SEND students aged 4-25 using Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental design (QED) controlled trials. The focus is on educational outcomes related to reading, writing, mathematics, and science. Approximately 55,500 studies were screened and 490 records were included, with data extraction currently underway. Only 7 studies were found to focus explicitly on those with Down Syndrome.
The findings will undergo critical evaluation through narrative synthesis and gap analysis. The synthesis focuses on descriptive summaries of the studies identified, lessons learnt from previous research (including methods, outcomes and questions asked), and identifying gaps for future research.
The review aims to offer a comprehensive understanding of the evidence and assess whether support for SEND individuals should be tailored or can be generalized across different needs. We will discuss the impact for theory and practice of these findings.
Parent's Issues in 2024 with the Education of their Children at Primary & Post Primary Stages: An Internal Down Syndrome Ireland Research Project
Dr Fidelma Brady EdD; MA[Ed]; B.Ed; H.Dip[SpEd], Head of Education – Down Syndrome Ireland
Contact Details: fidelma@downsyndrome.ie
As Head of Primary & Post Primary Education with Down Syndrome Ireland, I am contacted by parents on a daily basis in relation to issues their children are experiencing in schools. To establish a more complete picture of the situation nationally, parents of children aged from 5 to 18 years at any stage in any setting at Primary or Post Primary were invited to participate in a survey. In addition to providing data on their geographical locations; and the age and education stage of their children, parents were invited to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their children's educational experience; and to identify areas for improvement.
246 parents participated in this research survey, with teacher attitude, knowledge and training one of the issues highlighted for improvement. In addition to presenting the analysis of findings at this forum, a report will be prepared and shared with the Department of Education, the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) and the Oireachtas Committees on Education & Progressing Disabilities.
Attentional processes as predictors of early numeracy for children with Down's Syndrome
Gaia Scerif1*, Ann Steele1 and Kim Cornish2
- Attention, Brain and Cognitive Development Group, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Anna Watts Building, Oxford OX2 6GG, United Kingdom
- Centre for Developmental Psychiatry & Psychology, Monash University, PO Box 64, Victoria 3800, Australia
* Presenting Author:
Gaia Scerif
Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Attention, Brain and Cognitive Development, Department of Experimental Psychology
University of Oxford, Anna Watts Building, Oxford OX2 6GG, United Kingdom
E-mail: gaia.scerif@psy.ox.ac.uk
Abstract
Background: Numerical skills can be an area of real difficulty for older children, young people and adults with Down's Syndrome (DS), but these difficulties are highly variable, with some people experiencing extreme problems, and others encountering fewer challenges. Multiple early cognitive factors may account for the emergence of these differences between older people with DS, and may offer potential targets for early support. Here we focus on attentional processes as a predictor of emergent differences in numeracy.
Research Questions: What are the early profiles of attentional and numerical cognition for children with DS? Do differences in attentional processes predict differences in early numerical skills between children with DS?
Method: Using a cross-syndrome and prospective longitudinal approach, we investigated: 1) early numeracy and attention profiles for children with DS (N = 25), in comparison with children with a different genetic condition, Williams syndrome (WS, N = 26), and neurotypically developing children (N = 105); and 2) the extent to which early attentional differences predicted early numeracy across these groups of children 12 months later, but particularly differences between children with DS.
Results: At the group level, children with DS showed early difficulties in early numeracy. Children with DS also displayed distinct patterns of early attentional differences, characterised by relatively weaker selective and sustained attention. For children with DS, differences in selective attention in particular predicted longitudinal improvements in numerical cognition, over and above early numerical skills, or verbal and non-verbal skills.
Conclusions: Early attentional differences contribute to differences between children with DS in their emerging numeracy. The predictive role of attentional processes for early numeracy suggests intervening on both these domain-general and domain-specific skills as they emerge. We close with evidence-based recommendations for how these interventions may be optimized.
Explicit and Implicit Mentalising in Down Syndrome, Prader-Willi Syndrome, and Autism
Lauren Jenner1, Prof Emily Farran1, Katherine Ellis1,2, Rachel Howard1, Dr Sarah White3, Dr Jo Moss1
- University of Surrey
- Institute of Clinical, Educational & Health Psychology, University College London
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London
Contact Lauren Jenner l.jenner@surrey.ac.uk
People with Down syndrome (DS) present with a heightened prevalence of clinically significant autism characteristics compared to the general population (Warner et al., 2017). The mentalising hypothesis, which suggests that autistic people struggle to understand and anticipate others' thoughts, intentions, and beliefs, is a prominent theory used to explain mechanistic differences underlying the characteristics of autism. However, there is limited research exploring how these differences may contribute to the manifestation of autism characteristics among people with DS. Traditional mentalising tasks (e.g., the Sally-Anne task [Baron-Cohen et al., 1985]) are heavily rely on language and cognitive abilities. Previous studies have indicated that performance on such tasks in DS tend to be confounded by phenotypic challenges with memory (e.g., Amado et al., 2016). Therefore, the methodological constraints associated with these explicit mentalising tasks hinder the differentiation of whether mentalising difficulties in DS contribute to the manifestation of autism characteristics. In autism research, eye-tracking technology offers a non-verbal measurement of mentalising with minimal cognitive demands, capturing implicit understanding of others' beliefs – referred to as implicit mentalising. We compared performance on explicit and implicit mentalising tasks among 4- to 19-year-olds with DS (N = 25), Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS; N = 27), and autism (N = 16). Through cross-syndrome and autism-relative comparisons, we aimed to determine how explicit and implicit mentalising abilities may be distinct to DS, and whether similarities existed with autism. Groups were comparable in chronological age, adaptive functioning, receptive language, and non-verbal reasoning. We employed traditional explicit mentalising tasks (Wellman & Lieu, 2004) alongside an eye-tracking paradigm designed to measure implicit mentalising (Senju et al., 2009). Participants with DS exhibited significantly greater difficulty with explicit mentalising compared to those with PWS (p = .01) and autistic participants (p = .03). Moreover, only participants with DS showed significantly poorer performance on the implicit mentalising task (p = .02), while those with PWS and autism performed at chance levels. Across all groups, challenges in receptive language and verbal short-term memory predicted poorer performance in explicit mentalising, but not in implicit mentalising. Conversely, greater autism characteristics predicted poorer performance in implicit mentalising (p = .01). Controlling for these predictors revealed similarities between autistic participants and those with DS specifically, with distinctions persisting between PWS and autism. These findings suggest that people with DS experience challenges with mentalising, similar to that seen in autism, potentially contributing to the increased co-occurrence of autism characteristics. Such insight could have clinical significance when considered alongside the broader DS phenotype (e.g., heightened social motivation, stubborn behaviour), and the profile of autism characteristics observed in DS (e.g., Fidler et al., 2022).
