A direct assessment analyzes the task to be learned in such a way that the steps required to learn the skills are specified and the child's level within the task is determined. This assessment takes into consideration that the child's immediate environment can make a difference in performance. (Author/SBH)

The poor achievement of secondary students with learning disabilities in mathematics is often affected by prior low achievement, low expectations for success, and inadequate instruction. Good instruction involves careful selection of examples; explicit instructional design; a parsimonious use of time and resources; and techniques such as direct…

Questionnaire responses from 65 supervisors in human service agencies and interviews with 27 employers, supervisors, and vocational program administrators indicated that employees with moderate special needs (in this case specific learning disabilities and low intelligence) surpass others in several positive work habits. Supervisors valued…

This study of 52 learning-disabled children, aged 8-13, found that direct feedback and practice improved metaphor interpretation. The approach was highly successful in teaching students to generalize concrete concepts to abstract ones. Further descriptive analyses indicated that grade and reading levels of subjects correlated with metaphor…

Twelve learning-disabled (LD) children (ages 9-11) with language impairments performed more poorly on 3 verbal metaphor tasks and a visual metaphor task than 12 LD children without language impairments, who, in turn, performed more poorly than 12 nondisabled children on all but the visual task. Context variations had no effect on performance.…

This study of 36 backward readers (mean age=111 months) from the Netherlands determined that repeated reading-while-listening of the same text did not lead to better results (except in reading speed) than reading different texts, and asking readers to detect mismatches between written and spoken texts did not improve performance. (Author/JDD)

Elementary learning-disabled boys (N=48) were randomly assigned to four feedback treatment conditions that involved orally reading nonsense words. Results demonstrated significant differences for: any type of feedback compared to no feedback, corrective feedback (modeling and sound-it-out) compared to general feedback, and modeling compared to…