Sharjah: Sharjah has launched a survey to identify learning difficulties that students face in the emirate’s elementary schools.
The Department of Statistics and Community Development (DSCD) is conducting the learning difficulties survey in collaboration with the Sharjah Centre for Learning Difficulties (SCLD).
The survey sheds light on families’ and teachers’ awareness of the challenges that students with dyslexia face, as well as challenges in attention, perception, cognition, memorisation, understanding and language skills. It also seeks to analyse the relationship between children’s pedagogic, educational and social environment and the possibility of having learning difficulties.
Dyslexia is a reading difficulty that makes it hard to identify how the sound of speech relates to forming letters and words.
Gathering feedback
Questionnaires are being distributed to parents of school students, teachers and education experts in different public and private schools across Sharjah. The survey sample comprises of 1,496 parents, 363 teachers and 157 education experts.
The focus of the survey is the role of early diagnosis and intervention in helping children who have learning difficulties, and the services they need for the treatment of cognitive skills as well as sensory, motor and behaviour functions, in addition to speech therapy.
The survey seeks to provide reliable information and official statistical data through measuring parents’ awareness of learning difficulties, and the level of knowledge teachers and education experts in Sharjah’s public and private schools have about those difficulties.
The data will help in creating SCLD development plans in the future.
Right to quality education
DSCD Director Sheikh Sultan bin Abdullah Al Qasimi said the survey is important because it addresses an important question about the right of students with learning difficulties to access a quality educational and pedagogical environment. He pointed out that the results will be a significant step towards the creation of mechanisms based upon precise data,to create future plans that reinforces SCLD operations.
The director of the DSCD called on the survey respondents to collaborate with the DSCD team and facilitate their mission through offering the needed information, stressing that confidentiality of all data, which is protected by federal laws, will only be utilised for statistical purposes.
