Inclusive classroom norms and children's expectations of inclusion of peers with learning difficulties in their social world.

We examined whether inclusive classroom norms predicted children's reasoning and expectations about the inclusion of peers with learning difficulties from different perspectives (i.e., self, friends, and unfamiliar story protagonist). Swiss elementary school children (N = 1019; 51% girls; Mage = 10.20 years; Grades 3-6) shared their perceptions of inclusive classroom norms and answered questions regarding the inclusion of a character with learning difficulties in an academic scenario. Multilevel analyses revealed that children expected less inclusion from their friends (estimated OR = 0.14, p < .001) or the unfamiliar story protagonist (estimated OR = 0.15, p < .001) than from themselves. Inclusive classroom norms positively predicted children's own (estimated OR = 3.17, p = .041) and their friends' inclusion expectations (estimated OR = 4.59, p = .007). Moreover, individuals who perceived higher inclusive norms than the classroom average were less concerned that the inclusion of the child with learning difficulties would threaten successful group functioning (γ = - 0.19, p = .011). To target the inclusion of children with learning difficulties, school psychologists can heighten classmates' perceptions of inclusive norms and pay attention to individual differences in norm perception.

Fusing a systematic and a case-based repository for medical decision support.

In order to take full advantage of computer-based decision support in clinical practice, it makes sense to combine systems which support the same subject, but contribute to this task in different ways. At the Technical University of Munich, a Combined Clinical Decision Support System (C-CDSS) of this kind has been designed for gastroenterologists. The main goal of the system is to help the physicians in finding information which is relevant for making the right diagnoses or applying the proper therapy to his patients. To achieve this goal, not only systematic knowledge of the medical domain, but also case-based data is useful for a comparison of the actual case with well-documented similar cases of colleagues. The systematic knowledge comprises state-of-the-art textual information and selected multimedia contents in the sense of a standard textbook. The case-based information includes practice-related information on a pool of anonymized cases from clinical routine and also demonstrations of new techniques. By integrating these information resources into one service via a rule-based retrieval system, a powerful decision support system can be generated.