To become an effective inclusive research team, all team members, regardless of ability, need to bring their own experiences and also learn necessary research skills. This paper highlights the need for team building, joint research training among all members of the research team and strategies supporting the peer-mentoring within the team. We are a team of four researchers with intellectual disabilities and four academic researchers without an intellectual disability. Our aim has been to learn about research together. We want to do this so that we can carry out a research project together about how older women with intellectual disabilities live. We have decided to call our team 'Welcome to our Class'. We have been working together for 9 months. In this time we have had 15 research training meetings. We have learned What research is How to work out a research question, that is what we want to find out about How to get information on what we want to find out. Here we thought of interview questions we could ask older women with intellectual disabilities. We are now meeting once a month, and have just begun our research on finding out how older women with intellectual disabilities live. We are now starting to use what we have learned.
This study explored the use of multimedia, student-generated social skills lessons coupled with teacher facilitation to improve the social skills of middle-school students with emotional disabilities. The effects of teacher-led social skills instruction and the combination of teacher-led and multimedia student-generated social skills instruction on the perceived social behaviors of the students were compared. Maintenance of perceived student social skills over time was examined. Also evaluated were the effects of traditional and combined interventions on student knowledge of social skills. The results indicated that both interventions were effective in improving the students' social skills and their knowledge of social skills. Teachers, parents, and students all perceived that student social skills improved over the course of the study. Students appeared to have maintained the improvements from both interventions over the maintenance periods. The participating teachers perceived that the combined intervention was more effective than the traditional intervention in improving maintenance of social skills. However, parents and students did not perceive any differences in the effectiveness of the two interventions or of the two interventions over time on improving students' social skills performance.
Participant-driven photo-elicitation, a visual research technique, is commonly used with marginalised and vulnerable groups of individuals. Reflections on the use of this technique are illustrated through a study examining the conceptualisation of student wellbeing from the perspectives of teachers, parents, and students with autism spectrum disorder. Interviews were used to collect data from teachers and parents, while photovoice, a community and participatory action research strategy, was used as a data collection method for students. Although participant-driven photo-elicitation (a component of photovoice) requires much planning, resources, collaboration with teachers, and the flexibility of the researcher, it empowers and engages students with autism spectrum disorder, helps develop social, communication, and self-awareness skills, enables the collection of rich data, and enables the voices of these students to be heard.
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