Developing thoughts with intellectual disabilities

What characterises the thought processes of people with intellectual disabilities? And what makes them different from those of people with normal intellectual development? This book aims to provide an intervention method for developing competences believed to be central to the thought processes, reasoning and memory of an individual, both with and without cognitive difficulties. The theoretical frame of reference is offered by Robert J. Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence, which examines typical characteristics and cognitive ways of functioning from a wide prospective, open to the interaction between individuals and their environments.
The programme uses 196 illustrated worksheets, designed for children and adolescents with mild or moderate cognitive difficulties and meant to appear neither too simple nor too complex, in order to stimulate pupils to solve them without creating frustration.
They are mainly designed for children and adolescents with mild to moderate cognitive difficulties; nevertheless, the more challenging activities could also be given to children with normal cognitive abilities in the first years of primary school.
Training is targeted specifically at the development of competences in the following areas:
– functional relationships between objects
– classifications
– completing a series
– analogical reasoning
– searching for the cause of an event
– problem solving
– using mental images
– learning the meanings of words
– programming actions
– memory and metamemory
– attribution skills
– metacognitive functions.

This book is closely connected to Educating in reasoning. The worksheets contained in the two books make up a single programme, whose goal is to develop various competences which are believed to be central in the field of cognitive organisation, in particular in children and adolescents with mild to moderate cognitive impairments.