This study investigated children’s attitudes towards children with Down syndrome in Ireland, France, Portugal and Spain. A sample of 805 children divided approximately equally by country, sex, grade level (9 and 11 years of age), and school type (inclusive or non-inclusive) participated in the study. Differences are reported for each independent variable on three dependent variables, sociability, attitude to inclusion and use of negative words to describe a child with Down syndrome. The study is one of a series that examined empirically how children construe their ideas about children with learning difficulties. Some used constructivist approaches in classrooms with a view to seeing if such experiences led to differentiation of the children’s ideas. The approaches were inspired by Jean Piaget’s and Ernst von Glasersfeld’s work. Relevance: This article shows how children think about children with Down Syndrome with different ideas. It provides ideas for teachers who want to work with children with fixed ideas about children with Down Syndrome

Key words: Constructivism, children, education, Down Syndrome

This study was undertaken in a European Comenius Project designed to understand teachers” perceptions of the origins of school failure in France, Spain and Ireland. It includes empirical work on how teachers in each country think about what is important in determining school failure and what teachers can do to remedy failure. The social contexts in each country vary and these differences provide teachers in each country to reflect on their own practices in classrooms with pupils in difficulty. The work implicitly refers to a constructivist model developed by Ernst von Glasersfeld in which ways teachers think about their jobs is the result of their experiences in their own educational systems and determines their approach to their professional activities. Relevance: This book described a cross national project to help children with learning difficulties. It should be of interest to constructivists as it includes data about the ways teachers in the different participating countries think about the best way to help children in difficulty. In each country the approaches are different, constrained partly by their own perceptions of what is possible within the constraints in their respective countries.

Key words: Teacher attitudes, models of teaching, special needs, children