Self-advocacy represents a wide range of skills and abilities that we need during schooling, later employment and during everyday life. Self-advocacy is the ability to defend oneself, one's own needs and desires, and to make decisions about one's own life. It encompasses the skills of communication, cooperation, conveying opinions and needs. It is a process that develops and builds throughout our lifetime. The base foundation of self-advocacy begins to be laid in school, where the children are faced with various school and social challenges, where they must express their opinions, needs, wishes, and interests. These skills influence an individual's school performance, success in social relationships and the formation of a positive self-image. Children who attend school mostly acquire self-advocacy skills through observation and model learning, but this cannot be said for all school-going children. Due to their deficits, students with severe specific learning difficulties (hereafter SSLD) find it more difficult to directly acquire self-advocacy skills, facing many obstacles in the school skill field. These are the students who need the teacher's help and guidance to a greater extent, and direct learning of self-advocacy skills, which can facilitate the process of education and can later be transitioned to high school and employment. The school environment, learning process, the formation of an individualized program (hereafter IP), help within the framework of hours dedicated to additional professional support (hereafter APS), they can all be opportunities through which students with SSLDs can be adequately prepared and trained in self-advocacy skills. The mentioned situations provide them with a safe environment where they can practice and test these skills. With the help of questionnaires designed for the purpose of the master’s thesis, we determined how well the pupils with SSLDs in the third educational period of primary school know their deficits and strong areas, and how successful self-advocates they are. The answers from the students and teachers, collected from the questionnaires, were then further elaborated with in-depth interviews. All students are included in a program with adapted implementation and additional professional assistance. The sample consisted of 30 students with SSLDs and 30 teachers who teach these students (teachers, special education teachers). For statistical analysis, we used the following methods: descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U-test and Wilcoxon test. The results of the research showed the relatively well-developed self-advocacy skills of students with SSLDs according to their own opinion and the opinion of their teachers. We found that students with SSLDs know their deficits and can successfully highlight their strong areas. We also found that students with SSLDs, to a large extent, participate in the design and evaluation of their IP. We also compared the evaluations of self-advocacy using equivalent pairs (student-teacher) and found that the evaluations are in principle consistent, only with some items are there statistically significant differences. These items relate to a greater extent to the executive functions of pupils with SSLDs and their social inclusion. As part of the master’s work, the theoretical part also provides guidelines on how a teacher can directly help a student with SSLDs in developing self-advocacy skills.
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