Thanks to The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) for granting my application!

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