Students with disabilities should not only be members of general education classrooms, but must also be able to learn meaningful skills in those settings, not just socialize with peers. This article reviews effective teaching methods and their contextual fit with the working of a general education classroom. The response to intervention (RtI)…

Research on communication instruction for students with severe intellectual disabilities is reviewed, focusing on the pragmatic elements involved in accomplishing a successful communicative exchange. A federally funded project, called the "Conversation and Social Competence Research Project," is then described. The project sought to…

Steps to foster improvement in individualized instruction are outlined, and stress is placed on developing teacher competencies and systematic procedures. The steps used to accomplish this include planning in terms of goals; organizing work; establishing the proper classroom environment; employing teaching strategies that are diagnostic,…

Too often, teachers working with individualized instructional programs turn the instruction over entirely to kits, packets, and canned commercial materials and abandon all meaningful teacher/student and student/student interaction. This paper urges teachers to avoid a total dependence on commercial and teacher-made learning packets. It examines…

A learning contract is a document, drawn up by a student and his instructor or advisor that specifies what the student will learn, how this will be accomplished, within what period of time, and what the criteria of evaluation will be. The student and instructor agree upon specific objectives, resources to be used, and feedback sessions.…

Plans and objectives for a symposium on the development of a system of language instruction for European adults, patterned after the American unit/credit concept, are outlined in this orientation paper. The background and rationale for the symposium reflect an emerging interest in European education which will allow for greater flexibility in…

The purpose of this article is to describe an applied method of assessing and manipulating environmental factors influencing student behavior. The assessment procedure is called structural analysis (SA) and can be a part of a functional behavioral assessment (FBA) process or a stand-alone set of procedures for teachers to use in their classrooms.…

This study was designed to examine the effects of tracing and fading prompts to improve the handwriting of two preschoolers both diagnosed as Developmentally Delayed (DD) and one of whom had fine motor goals. The study took place in a self-contained special education public preschool classroom located in the Pacific Northwest. The results showed…

Intended for teachers of severely and profoundly retarded children, the text presents guidelines for designing individualized programs for these children and specific teaching techniques which the authors have found successful with children having a mental age of from 0 to 36 months. An introduction defines severely and profoundly retarded and…

Intended to help teachers of young handicapped children identify specific development lags and plan for individualized remediation, the curriculum guide includes major sections on the individual pupil checklist, developmental pinpoints, the individualized education program (I. E. P.), teaching suggestions, the use of paraprofessionals and…

As part of the Army's adoption of performance-oriented instruction in Army Training centers, a study was conducted to determine the feasibility of using sefl-paced instruction without programed texts in a clerical and computational skills course. Course organization, course management, and effective instructional techniques for self-paced training…

An undertaking designed to teach the fundamental concepts of programing makes the learner learn frame writing by means of frames. A sliding card gradually discloses the two basic sequences which programs usually follow--the linear and the branching sequences. A branching sequence may be normal or remedial, a frame regular or mainstream. A linear…

This collection includes essays on individualizing reading (IR) and the language arts and individualizing social studies in elementary school education. Several essays explain the purposes of IR. Teachers who have used such a program explain how they did it and why they felt it successful. Supplementing these essays are reports of individualized…

This newsletter contains a series of brief reports concerning methods of individualizing language learning and describes several ongoing experiments. The first article illustrates how individualized achievement charts aid in determining students' instructional needs. Group work and oral testing are discussed as a means of individualizing a course…

The primary purpose of this twelve-week case study was to explore the use of a cooperative learning strategy with small groups of students in a 12th-grade economics class as diverse learners prepared for tests. The complete case study was based on observations of students, student surveys, focus group interviews, and interviews with educators at…