Reveals that different aspects of the environment differentially contributed to variability in communication performance of one-year-old infants. Findings support the environmental specificity hypothesis and underline the need to consider physical environmental parameters when investigating environmental influences. (Author/RH)

Six causal-influence diagrams introduce a model showing the difficulties of implementing school improvement policies in such areas as teacher expectations and student behavior. The first diagram deals with basic dynamics of improvement. Cybernetics of activities to correct student achievement are revealed in a second diagram, which portrays…

Issues related to the ecological assessment of students with mild to moderate disabilities are examined. The paper discusses targeting student behavior according to its context and in relation to present and future socioenvironmental demands; aspects of an ecological assessment model; and thoughts on incorporating aspects of ecological assessment…

Community colleges are recognized today as critical links between high schools and four-year colleges. This paper presents a research model for understanding the transfer function and transfer performance at the level of the college. The model discusses the community college in terms of its capacity for institutionalizing functions and its overall…

This study analyzed the Tertiary Admission Examination and Australian Scholastic Aptitude Test results for 264 pairs of 17-year-old monozygotic and dizygotic twins in Western Australia to determine if examination performance is influenced by environmental or genetic factors. Purely environmental models are rejected as inadequate explanations of…

Research summarized here demonstrates how similarity thinking can be used in training programs to help ethnic minority children acquire basic skills. Current achievements are often attenuated by poor language skills, especially when English is not the first language of the child. Similarity thinking assesses the child's ability to learn without…

Examines explanations used by children (ages five-14) to explain academic success and failure; frequency of their use; and developmental variations in types of explanations used. It was found that patterns of attribution categories vary by age, and that the attribution process involves a complex interaction of subjective and objective reality.…

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…