PostprintThis is the accepted version of a paper published in Early Child Development and Care. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination.Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Brodin, J., Hollerer, L., Renblad, K., Stancheva-Popkostadinova, V. (2015) Preschool teachers' understanding of quality in preschool: a comparative study in three European countries. The aim of this article is to highlight the concept quality with special focus on preschool teachers understanding and compare what preschool teachers in Austria, Bulgaria and Sweden regard as quality. Although quality is at high degree a subjective concept, some aspects are regarded decisive for good quality. A questionnaire was distributed to 45 preschools. Data has been stored, processed and compiled with the web-based program 'Netigate'. Totally 117 preschool teachers answered the questionnaire. The results between the three countries have been compiled, processed, ranked and compared and show a glace of different ways to interpret quality, although there are also similarities. Many differences are related to social, cultural and financial issues in the countries per se but there are also organizational and structural differences. Further comparative research need to focus on modes to improve the quality in preschool and on increasing children's influence.
Early Child Development and
The paper presents a linear control system framework for design of technology-based games for pedagogical rehabilitation of children with special learning needs as a central component of the proposed cyber-physical system for inclusive education. The novelty is in explicitly addressing the issue of quantitatively estimating the improvement of games in the desired direction during the design process. An advantage of the proposed approach is its applicability to small groups of children playing diverse sets of games without loss of generalisability of the linear system's model assumptions. Statistically justified experimental results are reported as providing support to the main hypotheses of the present study.
The use of innovative technology in the field of Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) has gained significant attention nowadays. Despite being a promising research area, Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have not been thoroughly studied and used in SLT. This paper makes two main contributions: firstly, providing a comprehensive review of existing research on the use of SARs to enhance communication skills in children and adolescents. Secondly, organizing the information into tables that categorize the interactive play scenarios described in the surveyed papers. The inclusion criteria for play scenarios in the tables are based only on their effectiveness for SLT proven by experimental findings. The data, systematically presented in a table format, allow readers to easily find relevant information based on various factors, such as disorder type, age, treatment technique, robot type, etc. The study concludes that the despite limited research on the use of social robots for children and adolescents with communication disorders (CD), promising outcomes have been reported. The authors discuss the methodological, technical, and ethical limitations related to the use of SARs for SLT in clinical or home environments, as well as the huge potential of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a secondary assistive technology to facilitate speech and language interventions.
There has been encouraging progress in policies and services aimed to improve the well being and respect of human rights of persons with intellectual disability in Serbia and Bulgaria, but well designed and methodologically rigourous scientific studies are needed to inform the future policies and practice for the benefit of people with intellectual disability.
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