A behavior management specialist implemented a practicum intervention designed to increase prosocial behavior and positive peer interaction among kindergartners and first graders by means of student participation in a self-motivating play group. Five students attended a daily play session in block and housekeeping play settings that had been…

This paper describes a practicum that incorporated semantic mapping, "rich" context clue instruction, and teacher modeling into a 12-week instructional program for 18 Chapter 1 fourth-grade students in rural Georgia who had shown deficiency in vocabulary knowledge with standardized test scores below the 50th percentile in the second and…

A school district's program coordinator designed and implemented a practicum study intended to provide intermediate grade teachers and students with problem-solving techniques and skills needed for success in a course in contemporary Canadian issues. Teachers' and students' problem-solving skills were assessed through reports based on…

This paper describes a social studies unit which addresses the problem of cultural dissonance in black, inner city kindergarten children who enter school without adequate classroom social interaction skills. In order to avoid using extensive academic time to orient children toward cooperative behavior and discipline procedures throughout the…

This practicum was designed to bring together first and third generations in a caring, supportive, mentoring classroom atmosphere. The study was conducted in a co-educational K-5 public elementary school with 90 percent white enrollment. The subjects were from three fourth-grade classrooms, each with 28 heterogeneous students. Volunteer, retired…

The goals of this practicum were to encourage parents to assess their use of over-the-counter drugs as a behavior model for children and to increase parental knowledge about over-the-counter drugs. Parents attended three "activity lectures," that is, lectures that included group activities and discussion. Before the activity lectures,…

The goal of the project presented in the practicum was to help parents develop competencies in interacting with their children in ways which foster self esteem and cooperative behavior. The objectives of the practicum included, first, increasing parents' knowledge of: (1) the factors leading to high self esteem and cooperative behavior; (2) the…

This report describes a practicum that was designed to improve the social skills of eight preschool children with autism or Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), through interactions with their typically developing peers. The children were taught in a classroom with eight typically developing children using a regular…

This practicum focused on the use of repeated taped reading instruction with modeling to improve fluency, comprehension, and automatic word recognition in five students (ages 11-13 years) with learning disabilities for a period of 10 weeks. The instruction also involved the teacher giving corrective feedback and having the students answer story…

This practicum aimed to increase parental involvement in an elementary school through the fourth grade. Objectives were that: (1) parental attendance at PTA meetings would increase by 25 percent; (2) the number of parent chaperons per field trip would increase from zero to two; and (3) one parent would help out with classroom activities each week.…

This practicum sought to understand why students in a Diversified Cooperative Training (DCT) program did not see the need to earn good grades or to complete their high school education. One hundred DCT programs were surveyed statewide, and it was found that 66 percent reported problems with attendance, 35 percent revealed problems with student…