Early reading learning for special needs students: Challenges on inclusive primary school during COVID-19 pandemic

This study is meant to describe the types of disability faced by students in inclusive schools and the challenges faced by teachers as well as students in early reading learning for students with special needs in inclusive primary schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was conducted in 12 inclusive primary schools in Magetan Regency, Indonesia. This research is a descriptive qualitative research in which psychological assessment consisting of intelligence tests CPM, and WISC, documentation, passive observation, and in-depth interviews were used to collect the data. The data were collected from informants, events or activities of student interaction in school, and documents of students’ backgrounds and other related documents. The subjects of this study were 72 special needs students with special needs in 12 inclusive primary schools. The data were then analyzed using an interactive analysis model. The results showed that slow learning is the most common type of disability faced by students with special needs in inclusive elementary schools around Magetan Regency, Indonesia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, early reading learning was conducted through distance learning which encountered many obstacles, such as lack of mobile phone due to the low socioeconomic status of parents. © 2021 Linguistics and Culture Review.

The impact of islamic counseling intervention towards students’ mindfulness and anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic

The pandemic caused by the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) has had psychological and health impacts on people's lives around the world. On a psychological aspect, this pandemic has caused anxiety due to low mindfulness. To increase the potential of mindfulness, one of the ways taken is by counselor psychological intervention. The authors used an Islamic counseling approach to reduce anxiety and increase mindfulness. Therefore, the research was conducted using a quasi-experimental design with non-equivalent control group design. Participants in this study were 14 students consisting of 7 students for each experimental and control group. Participants were invited after filling self-report the anxiety scale facing COVID-19 and indicated that they were in the high category. The data analyzed with the Wilcoxon sign rank test to determine the impact of before and after the intervention was given, then used the Mann Whitney to find out the mean differences between the experimental and control group, and the Rank Spearman to determine the correlation between mindfulness and anxiety. The results showed that Islamic counseling intervention is effective to increase mindfulness which impacted on reducing anxiety in facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, the results of correlation analysis using the Rank Spearman show that there is a correlation between mindfulness and anxiety. © Kadafi, A., Alfaiz, A., Ramli, M., Asri, D., & Finayanti, J. (2021).