Students with Disabilities on Fine Art Degrees

The Arts Council and Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities were concerned that disabled students were not gaining access to professional training in the arts. As part of a project to encourage institutions to improve access, the Arts Council funded Skill to conduct a survey of existing provision for students with disabilities on fine art degree courses. Forty institutions were surveyed. Respondents were asked both about the facilities available to students with disabilities within their own college, and about their own view of the feasibility of disabled people studying fine art. The picture that emerged varied greatly between colleges; most colleges had responded to the needs of individual students, but few had taken any systematic approach to widening access. There was also a discrepancy between respondents who felt certain disabilities would debar students studying fine art, and others who had had practical experience of teaching students with those disabilities. The survey forms part of a wider project by Skill and the Arts Council.     

Cognitive training for children: Effects on inductive reasoning,deductive reasoning,and mathematics achievement in an Australian school setting

Inductive reasoning is a core cognitive process of fluid intelligence, predicting a variety of educational outcomes. The Cognitive Training for Children (CTC) program is an educational intervention designed to develop children's inductive reasoning skills, with previous investigations finding substantial effects of the program on both inductive reasoning ability and classroom learning. The present study assessed both individual and small‐group CTC training against a no‐treatment control condition to investigate the effects on inductive and deductive reasoning and mathematics achievement in a primary school‐aged Australian cohort. Students who received individual training outperformed those in the control condition on measures of inductive and deductive reasoning, and those in the small‐group condition also outperformed the control condition on a measure of inductive reasoning 3 months following training. However, hypotheses regarding transfer effects to mathematics achievement were not supported. Directions for future research, focusing on extended longitudinal studies and motivational variables, are discussed.