Exceptional Children最新文献

A 2-year project to improve the writing skills of children who are deaf included instruction for teachers in the process approach to teaching writing. The project encompassed 10 public school programs for students who are deaf and included 325 students in Grades 4-10 and 52 teachers. The project included specific training goals for teachers, a self-report procedure for the teachers, and a data-collection and analysis phase to assess short-term effects on students' writing. Teacher self-reports indicated widespread involvement in the project, and pretest and posttest results showed dramatic improvement in students' writing--particularly in grammatical skills. Scoring systems for students' papers are included.

A nationwide purposive sample of secondary vocational educators completed a questionnaire that examined practices and perceptions toward grading students with disabilities. A variety of grading methods was reportedly used, but over two-thirds of respondents included a competency-based grading component. An overwhelming majority believed that student effort should be used to determine grades. Two-thirds of vocational educators had never been involved in their students' IEP development. The most common changes teachers have made over time in their grading practices included becoming more flexible and individualized in grading. Overall, teachers displayed moderately positive attitudes toward grading students with disabilities.

This study investigated the use of the Task Demonstration Model (TDM) of group instruction for students with severe or moderate retardation. This model and the Standard Prompting Hierarchy (SPH) were tested against each other (and baseline) across three teachers and groups of students. Results on teacher variables showed that demands and praise were roughly equivalent for both procedures, but prompts were 12 times higher in SPH than in TDM. Data on student variables showed task engagement to be the same for SPH and TDM, percent correct to be 10% higher in TDM, but rate correct to be twice as much in TDM as in SPH.

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the views of 12 low-income Puerto Rican parents whose children were classified as learning disabled or mildly mentally retarded. Different cultural meanings of disability and normalcy led parents to reject the notion of disability and focus on the impact of family identity, language confusion, and detrimental educational practices on children's school performance. Parents' views were in line with current arguments against labeling and English-only instruction.

This study examined the effectiveness of a summarization strategy for increasing comprehension of expository prose in students with learning disabilities. Thirty students with learning disabilities from Grades 6 through 9 were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In addition, 15 students without disabilities served as a normal comparison group for comprehension. Students in the experimental condition were trained to criterion on five rules of summarization. Direct instruction in the summarization strategy significantly increased reading comprehension of the students in the experimental group. Strategy usage was maintained over time, and students were reported to generalize its use.

This study examined how classroom teachers in one elementary school approached the problem of designing specialized instruction for students with reading problems. We asked 12 teachers to rate their confidence in designing effective interventions and then to diagnose a student's reading problem, select an intervention, and implement it. Teachers were moderately confident about their ability to design effective interventions; but some teachers expressed doubts about how to proceed. Their approach to intervention differed somewhat from that of special education resource teachers. Some teachers experienced considerable difficulty in implementing the interventions they selected.

This study investigated the concurrent relations between measures of adaptive/maladaptive behavior and community adjustment in a sample of 239 adults with mild to severe degrees of mental retardation. Using canonical correlation procedures and multidimensional community adjustment measures, the investigators found significant relations between the measures of behavior and several community adjustment dimensions. The results provided evidence for the criterion-related validity of measures of adaptive/maladaptive behavior and suggested that such skills provide an important contribution to community adaptation and to program planning and decision making for individuals with mental retardation.

In 1982 the U.S. Supreme Court held than an appropriate education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was one that was formulated in accordance with the Act's procedures and that conferred some educational benefit on students with disabilities. Initially, the lower court applied this terminology strictly and approved any proposed individualized education program that conferred even minimal educational benefit. However, later courts began to take a more liberal approach and held that the educational program must confer some meaningful benefit. A careful reading of the Supreme Court's 1982 decision indicates that this recent approach is consistent with Congress's and the Court's intent. The Court never intended to establish one test of appropriateness since it recognized that some flexibility was needed to determine what would be appropriate for a diverse population of students with disabilities.

The effects of self-monitoring on generalization and maintenance of social skills were investigated. Participants were one female and two male adults with mild mental retardation. A multiple-baseline-across-subjects design with five phases was employed. After an initial baseline condition, the subjects were trained in individualized social skills. Following return to baseline, subjects were taught to self-monitor their behavior, in both training and natural settings. Finally, the use of the self-monitoring device was faded, and all intervention contingencies were withdrawn for the maintenance phase. Data were collected in the analogue and generalization settings throughout all phases of the study. Self-monitoring assisted in generalization of trained social skills across settings and people; however, maintenance results were variable.