This study examined the strategies teachers use to promote social play in a mainstreamed early childhood program that included five children with special needs and five nonhandicapped peers. Results indicated that teachers can successfully facilitate peer play through initiation of play, participation in group play, elaboration of group play, and…

This study involving three autistic and four nondisabled preschool children found that a peer-initiation intervention produced increases in peer initiations and social interactions when the teacher verbally prompted, but not without verbal prompts. When a correspondence training/visual feedback package was implemented, peer initiations and social…

The interactions of three dyads, consisting of one student with moderate mental retardation and one nondisabled peer, were assessed while playing computer games. Results indicated that students (ages 13-14) exhibited more frequent social initiations, higher degrees of game satisfaction, and equal/higher degrees of peer satisfaction while playing…

This paper discusses what teacher education programs can do to prepare teachers for diverse classrooms. One approach is through cooperative learning, since children come to school with various orientations to cooperative behavior. Many teachers, however, jump into cooperative activities with little thought of the behaviors needed by students to…

Findings are presented from a study of social interactions between hearing-impaired and hearing college students living on one floor of a mainstreamed residence hall at the Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology, home of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Twelve ethnographic observations were completed, and interviews were…

This monograph explores the current use in higher education of cooperative learning, the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning. The opening section sets out to define cooperative learning, and to look at the history of the technique, its basic elements, types of cooperative…