Pedagogical-didactic training for an inclusive didactics: the Precision Teaching for strengthening of basic and integrating skills in Intellectual Disabilities

In recent years focused studies have highlighted increasingly the importance to use new technologies during the planning of educational and didactic paths apt to develop skills and functions in disables patients. It deals with assistive technologies which represent real opportunities of e-participation to social life. They also work as scaffolding in order to promote developing processes for an inclusive didactics. Our contribution moves in such direction: about the importance of technologies in mental retardation. This importance turns around the usability of many inputs which can offer to disabled patients the possibility to exercise their cognitive styles, their own characteristics and their own autonomies just to increase motivation and self-esteem. So, a didactic application of educational software, based on Precision Teaching method, has been proposed in order to: a) verify the effectiveness of this didactic software on learning of integrative skills; b) verify gender differences. For this study 40 children have been selected (20 boys and 20 girls) with and without mental retardation. Results show learning improvements in each group; in spite of students’ difficulties, the use of Precision Teaching seems to have reduced significantly the initial cognitive gap which refers to the number of correct responses (accuracy) and to response time (fluency) relative to the learning of how to use money. Finally, new perspectives of its pedagogical and rehabilitative application for students with special needs have been also discussed.