'I never thought they would enjoy the fun of science just like ordinary children do'– Exploring science experiences with early years teacher training students and children with severe and profound learning difficulties

Alison Bishop and Phyllis Jones both work in the School of Education at Northumbria University where they teach on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Phyllis Jones specialises in disability issues and Alison Bishop focuses on early years education. For the project described in this paper, they combined their areas of expertise, devising a small–scale research project to explore the experiences of a group of early years science specialist student teachers as they took part in workshops with a group of early years children with severe and profound learning difficulties. The research explores the changing attitudes and perceptions of the students with regard to the learning and teaching of science with young children. It becomes clear that there is a realization for many students that science can make a significant contribution to the education of children with severe and profound learning difficulties in the early years. The authors also discuss the need for training to equip the students to meet the challenges and rewards of working with children with severe and profound learning difficulties in their future teaching careers.     

Connecting with connexions: the role of the personal adviser with young people with special educational and support needs

The Connexions service has particular responsibility for coordinating transition planning for students with learning difficulties. In this study Bob Grove and Alison Giraud–Saunders report on the development of the personal adviser (PA) role in two special schools and an FE college as part of the Lewisham Connexions pilot. This article is based on the evaluation report of the Connecting with Connexions project, which is available in full from the authors.     

‘What do you call the dull words?’ Primary school children using corpus‐based approaches to learn about language

This article reports on a study in progress which is exploring the potential for teaching Key Stage 2 pupils about the grammar and vocabulary of English with materials based on an electronically stored corpus of texts and associated software. It includes examples of the teaching activities used and extracts of discussions between the researcher and two groups of pupils. It illustrates children beginning to explore the distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ classes of words.     

Stimulus change and complexity in exploratory behavior

It has recently been proposed (Fowler, 1967, 1971) that the incentive value of novelty can be defined in terms of stimulus change. An experiment is reported which examines the relationship between changes in complexity and the consequent exploratory behavior. Following extended exposure to a midcomplexity stimulus, rats were allowed to choose between a stimulus change and the now familiar midcomplexity stimulus. For some Ss the change was to a stimulus of higher complexity, and for others the change was to a lower complexity stimulus. The results suggest that physical stimulus changes to a stimulus of greater complexity is a more effective novel stimulus than physical stimulus changes to lesser complexity, although both changes may function as incentives.