This field study report is concerned with the development,
implementation and evaluation of a Diploma of Special Education
(UG2) teacher training program. In March, 1974, the Advanced
Education Beard of Mew South Wales requested that Nepean College
of Advanced Education, Westmead, implement a one year training
course for Generalist (Resource) Teachers in Special Education
to begin in February, 1975.
The lecturers in special education, Mr. Richard Fee and Mr.
George Comino, proceed to design a training program which
departed radically from the approach adopted by the other colleges
of advanced education in New South Wales (Mitchell, Newcastle,
Kuring-gai, Alexander Mackie). Instead of following the noncategorical/
commonality approach used at these colleges, Nepean
chose the categorical method. With this method, the education of
a number of different handicapped children is studied separately
(i.e. mentally retarded, orthopaedically handicapped, etc.)
rather than by studying the various disorders collectively (i.e.
Exceptional Children in Society, Exceptional Children in School,
etc.).
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of Nepean's approach
to training special education teachers, on-going and summative
evaluation in a variety of forms was carried out during the first
semester. This evaluation which included the administration of a
pilot Teacher Competency in Special Education Self-Rating Scale
clearly demonstrated that the first intake of 29 students made
significant increases in their ability to teach exceptional
children. The results of the evaluation also assisted the lecturers
in determining areas of course weakness which could be alleviated
during the second semester.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218928 |
| Date | January 1976 |
| Creators | Fee, Richard Walter, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Teacher Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Richard Walter Fee |
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