The principal aim of the present study is to examine the level of parental satisfaction with inclusive education for their children with disability attending Italian schools of any grade level. The survey involved 285 parents of pupils randomly selected from the population of students with disability certificates. On average, parents expressed a high level of satisfaction. Four principal components of parental satisfaction were extracted from the item scores of the questionnaire: inclusive educational practices; environment and special equipment; classmates' and families' acceptance; integration between education and rehabilitation activities. Various correlations were found between these aspects and both child-related and context-related variables. In particular, children's emotional regulation abilities evaluated by teachers are involved in various dimensions of the parents' satisfaction. On the other hand, satisfaction with the integration between the educational and rehabilitation activities showed a significant negative correlation with the fathers' and mothers' educational level. Lastly, parental satisfaction towards classmates' and families' acceptance appears to be the most critical aspect and tends to decrease in relation to school level, while it is positively linked with the number of hours the support teacher spends in class. Taken together, these results stimulate useful considerations to promote better practices in inclusive education.

This article considers the cross-linguistic validity of the Direction Following Task (DFT), i.e. a verbal test of the central attentional component of working memory which is called M-capacity in neo-Piagetian theories. The DFT involves oral commands of different complexity, in which syntactic variation is kept to a minimum and the information load is varied systematically. Two studies investigated the DFT with 124 adults and 159 children, from 5 to 7, respectively. Study 1 compared the DFT with the Figural Intersections Test (FIT), a visuo-spatial M-capacity measure. Adults scored higher on the DFT than on the FIT; however, using modified scoring rules, that control for a recency effect due to cross-linguistic differences in word order, the mean DFT score was no longer different from the FIT Study 2 compared the DFT with the Mr. Cucumber Test and the Backward Digit Span (BDS) - a visuo-spatial and a verbal M-capacity measure, respectively. Children scored higher on the DFT than on the other two tests; however, the modified scoring aligned the mean DFT score with the Mr. Cucumber and the BDS means. Word order in Italian sentences seems to facilitate performance because recency allows easier retrieval of relevant information, whereas, in the English original sentences, recency enhances redundant information retrieval. The DFT yields valid M-capacity measures when recency effects are controlled in scoring The implications of cross-linguistic differences for task analysis and testing practice are discussed.

This paper explores the authorship of the written production of children with autism who need to be physically and emotionally supported by a competent interlocutor in order to communicate. Facilitated Communication is a technique developed for this purpose. However, a significant part of the scientific community considers it a controversial technique because of the difficulty in determining the authentic author of the message. The aim of this study is to examine the written communication of six autistic boys in order to investigate and determine direct or indirect evidence of authorship. In particular, the focus is on the process of communication itself, to find behaviours or written expressions that could disprove the hypothesis of a direct influence of the facilitator. Six secondary school students diagnosed with autism participated in this study. Each student participated in 8 sessions of facilitated communication, 4 with one parent at home, 4 with an educator at school, both parent and educator assuming the role of facilitator. According to our data, evidence of authorship was represented in all categories supporting our hypothesis that facilitated communication can be authentically based both on authentic interactions and messages between both partners.

This study investigated the relationship between emotion comprehension, grammar comprehension, and working memory capacity in children between 5 and 11 years (n= 130), testing the hypothesis that working memory has a role in the development of emotion comprehension. We replicated the correlation between emotion comprehension and grammar comprehension, and found that working memory capacity correlates with both of these variables (also with age statistically controlled). The significant effect of age on emotion comprehension was eliminated when working memory capacity was co-varied. In a regression analysis of emotion comprehension scores, when working memory capacity was entered as a predictor, no additional variance was significantly accounted for by grammar comprehension, gender, or age. A structural relations model, in which the paths from working memory capacity to emotion comprehension and from working memory capacity to grammar comprehension account fully for the correlation between grammar and emotion comprehension, fit the data well. However, working memory capacity was not equally related to all components of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) (Pons & Harris, 2000), the relationship being significant only for some of them. In particular, working memory capacity has a decisive role in the transition from understanding external to mental aspects of emotions. It is concluded that the development of working memory has a considerable impact on the development of emotion comprehension.