The steps involved in teaching multiple discrimination to disabled students are listed for ecological, performance, functional, and stimulus analyses. Additional considerations, including stimulus modification and design of the instructional sequence (successive or cumulative approaches), are reviewed. (CL)

Presents an interview with Susan Lederman that contains a fascinating and informative overview of the recent developments in neuropsychological research concerning the sense of touch. Discusses the physiological processes that support this sensory experience and reveals them to be much more flexible, intricate, and adaptive than previously…

Two studies found that 5 students (ages 9-10) needing emotional support acquired behaviors shown in instructive feedback conditions that were unrelated to the target behaviors, whereas target material presented with related instructive feedback stimuli were acquired at a slightly faster rate. The importance of considering novelty, interest, and…

Discusses competencies necessary for structuring teaching-learning environments (data, stimuli, and strategies) in objective-referenced or criterion-referenced instruction. Teaching competencies (behaviors) listed are pointed toward music instruction, but are applicable for all subject areas. (Author/AH)

The article describes new methodologies for teaching monetary skills to mentally retarded individuals. Procedures were designed to produce emergent new behavior through stimulus class formation, exclusion, and matching of stimulus components. Three case studies demonstrate the methods. (Author/DB)

This paper explains the brief stimulus preference procedure (SPA), which is designed to identify efficiently the effective reinforcers for children with autism and other developmental disabilities. SPA involves presenting the child with four items he/she generally responds well to plus one new item. After allowing the child to pick his preferred…

Research is reviewed on stimulus overselectivity in autistic children, and educational implications are discussed in terms of language acquisition, social behavior, observational learning, generalization, and prompting and prompt fading. Approaches to circumvent the problem of overselectivity are also described. (CL)

Forty-six fifth-and-sixth-grade students with hearing impairments participated in either a 14-period rhythmicity treatment program or a control program. Evaluation concluded that rhythm perception/production could be reliably measured and that the quality of rhythmic tapping performance was a function of the modality of stimulus presentation.…

This article offers theoretical principles and practical suggestions for teaching physical education to children with autism. It focuses on stimulus overselectivity in the autistic child, the problems it creates for prompting and generalization, and its implications for teaching physical education to this population. (DB)

Four autistic children, age 8-15, exhibited fewer correct responses to a stimulus as the number of stimulus components was increased from 1 to 4. Training was effective in producing some generalized increases in responses to complex stimuli. (Author/JDD)

The characteristics of the skill clusters involved in community living response chains were studied, focusing on the length of the chain, the response classes contained in the chain, and the implicit variations within the chain. Instruction of response chains can be enhanced through consideration of the stimulus control strategies used.…

A stimulus equivalence procedure for the acquisition of English and Spanish words was evaluated with two adolescents having head injuries. Following training on one task, subjects attained and maintained high scores on all matching-to-sample tasks. Results suggest the procedure is effective for teaching foreign language skills to head-injured…

Drawing from research on reading, this paper suggests various methods of stimulating cognition in beginning readers. Defining cognition as the process by which a person gains knowledge, or understands or comprehends, discussion in the paper centers on the following topics: (1) perceptive and cognitive skills; (2) prior experience; (3) knowledge of…

Data are summarized from 152 single-subject analyses of the reinforcing functions of self-injurious behavior (SIB) in individuals with developmental disabilities. Overall results indicated that functional analysis methodologies are extremely effective in identifying the environmental determinants of SIB on an individual basis and, subsequently, in…