I have received the information that The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund
(Sylff) had granted my application for a travel grant. This
grant gives me the opportunity for a two week stay at the School of
Experimental psychology at the University of Bristol.
Her
you can read the section if my application explaining my project:
The
aim of the project is to gain knowledge of the use of process evaluations and
measures to ensure implementation quality in language interventions for
children with Down syndrome.
Through
carrying out a structured litterature review on language interventions
delivered to children with Down syndrome I aim to contribute to an increased
knowledge on the meaning of the implementation process, factors influencing
implementation quality and measures of implementation quality in language
interventions. Gaining this knowledge is meaningful for several reasons. Down
syndrome is the most prevalent single cause of developmental disability and is
highly associated with language impairments. Early efforts made to promote
language development in this group are of great importance not only for the
development of language itself but also for other areas such as literacy and social functioning. The quality of
implementation highly impacts the validity
of the outcome measures of an intervention as well as being essential to the
degree to which the participants benefit from taking part in an intervention.
Knowing how important language abilities are in every aspect of life,
researchers hold a large ethical responsibility to ensure the quality of the
empirical basis of the pedagogical practices for children with language
impairments. Ensuring appropriate quality of the intervention research is
therefore vital to be able to deliver adequate and effective measures for
children already in a vulnerable state. However, implementation research has
been a somewhat unexplored area within social sciences and the reporting of
implementation data in study reports are scarce. Nevertheless, there is an
increasing awareness on the topic and a few journals are now requiring
descriptions of the steps taken to insure good implementation.
Dr.
Liz Smith, from the University of Bristol – School of experimental psychology,
has kindly extended me her invitation for a research stay under her guidance.
Dr. Smith has a postdoctoral position in the Down syndrome
LanguagePlus-project; a project based at the Department of Special Needs
Education at the University of Oslo. A research stay at the University of
Bristol would allow for discussions regarding the analysis and findings from my
master project within a multidisciplinary lab group with collaborators within
the fields of experimental psychology, psychology, linguistics and pedagogy.
Silje Hokstad
