Gauree Malkarnekar,TNN | Mar 6, 2014, 02.11 AM IST
PANAJI: Children with special needs will now have their syllabus from Class IX to XII modified to their individual needs if they find it difficult to cope with the curriculum in force. The academic council of the Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has approved an improvised scheme for special children to be implemented for 2014-15.
Under the modified scheme, once a child is certified for a disability, the institution along with the child, will have to decide if he or she is capable of taking up one of the existing courses of study offered by the board or if a new course based on the primary structure of the syllabus will have to be framed by bodies of the board to meet the individual student's need.
"If a particular student is unable to sit in the classroom because of his or her disability or there are other such issues, a separate syllabus can be framed under the new scheme to meet the child's individual needs. The benefits of this revised scheme have now also been extended to higher secondary students," Goa Board chairperson Jose Remedios Rebello said.
The Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) will include a description of the individualized curriculum for academics and skills, specific objectives, teaching learning strategies and assessment procedures.
The revised Goa Board scheme lays more stress on assimilating children with special needs with regular school students.
"High school teachers of regular schools are already being trained under the Central government's Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) to sensitize them to recognize the needs of special children in a regular class. Goa Board's modified scheme will require regular teacher training programmes to include at least one module on types and characteristics of disabilities and observation of these characteristics in students. Training programmes will be organized for existing teachers," Rebello said.
The revised scheme requires that special children too be assessed through continuous evaluation and the format for it will be drawn by the board of studies.
The board will also certify special children answering the Class X and XII public exams differently stating their level of disability, the subjects selected, the mode of assessment and the level of performance (preferably through grading).
Students with disabilities will be provided with some general concessions like decreasing their writing load by setting objective type questions, allowing verbal responses for children with writing difficulties, overlooking directional mistakes in maps in geography, awarding marks for the method employed in mathematics, pardoning the errors in calculation arising out of writing numbers in the wrong order, evaluating the content of answer rather than the syntax or structure and spelling errors and allowing point-form writing etc.
Source: Times of India
