Coaching of adults with developmental disorders is a client-centered, collaborative and goal-oriented process. Although recent studies indicate that the use of coaching may be beneficial for individuals with ADHD, for those with neurodevelopmental disorders, who tend to have fewer preferable avenues of action due to the cycle of failure, there are times where they may be unaware of what constitutes favorable behavior. In this study, we implemented coaching and bibliotherapy as means for clients to learn new options. Based on the changes in scores on facing problems encountered in daily life and mood states pre- and post-intervention, and an analysis of the literature on the merits and demerits of coaching and bibliotherapy, we investigate in what ways bibliotherapy can compensate for defıciencies in coaching. Analysis using the KJ Method showed that the elements of “bibliotherapy enables recall and confirmation” and “information in books is helpful” can supplement the function of coaching.

The purpose of this study was to clarify questions related to utilizing the Course of Study (COS) when subject instructions were provided in a special needs school for children with intellectual disabilities. Semi-structured interviews on instructional practices and the utilization of the COS were conducted with novices and their mentor teachers. Quantitative text analysis employing KH Coder software using the collected dialogue data revealed that the novice teachers struggled to understand the children's characteristics and to match their teaching style to the educational stage indicated in the COS. On the other hand, the mentor teachers regarded the commentary for subject instructions in the COS as a useful reference when the learning objectives were determined based on the children's actual characteristics. In the future, since the COS commentary includes a great deal of information, the development of an easily reference tool on its contents will be necessary.

The author discusses the psychological support available for hard of hearing and acquired hearing loss difficulties. Specifically, the author shows what kinds of psychological support has been available to people with hard-of-hearing and listening problems, including those who became hard of hearing after acquiring language, those with mild to moderate hearing loss, those with unilateral hearing loss, those with auditory processing disorder and those who do not have a physical disability certifıcate. The author also proposes support for people who have hitherto been unlikely to access such support, and describes the current status of efforts to make support available in Japan. This paper covers the psychological support provided by specialists, by people who are close to the individuals in question but are not specialists, and by other people who are hard of hearing. Support by people with hearing loss can be divided into three types: self-help groups, meetings for people with hearing loss, and “Tojisha-Kenkyu”, groups that research self-support. Each of these forms of psychological support is described, and the current status and the barriers to provision of support by people who are hard of hearing are described in detail. As future tasks, the author notes the tasks of how to maintain the cohesion of the various groups, empirical research on the effects of psychological support, and the need to raise greater awareness and disseminate information about hard of hearing people's meetings that engage in psychological support activities.

It has been reported that childhood-onset fluency disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 5-11％ of preschool-age children; however, approximately 80％ of children recover several years after onset. A great deal of research has been carried out over the past few decades to identify factors that are related to the prognosis of stuttering. These include a family history of stuttering; gender; age of onset; the severity of stuttering; the child's abilities in articulation and phonology; concomitant disorders; and the child's temperament. The present article gives an overview of three recent studies examining which factors predict the persistence and recovery of stuttering in preschoolers. These are a research review, a meta-analysis study, and research on building statistical models. The results of these studies suggest the prognosis of stuttering to be influenced by powerful and crucial genetic and biological factors, such as a family history of stuttering and gender, and with additional factors such as the severity of stuttering and speech-language vulnerabilities. Based on these conclusions, we discuss which clinical characteristics should be assessed and in what form support should be provided to allow the most appropriate and effective treatment decisions to be made. The duration of follow-up the children and the criteria for recovery of stuttering are also suggested as potential areas of future research.