This study, involving four staff members in an institution for people with mental retardation, found that a computerized system of prompts to improve staff-client interactions produced more positive statements, improved distribution of interaction among clients, and resulted in delivery of more positive reinforcement than a traditional…

Practices identified by experts as critical variables in eliciting writing samples were checked against 12 randomly selected studies using holistic ratings to derive descriptions of inferential statistical results for described samples. The studies often lacked precise information about these variables, limiting understanding of writing evaluation…

Purpose: Guided reading is a common practice recommended for children in the early stages of literacy development. While experts agree that oral reading facilitates literacy skills, controversy exists concerning which corrective feedback strategies are most effective. The purpose of this study was to compare feedback procedures stemming from 2…

Three studies evaluated Tier 1 early intervention for handwriting at a critical period for literacy development in first grade and one study evaluated Tier 2 early intervention in the critical period between third and fourth grades for composing on high stakes tests. The results contribute to knowledge of research-supported handwriting and…

Video modeling is a well-validated intervention documented in the behavioral sciences. It has been used to target a variety of behaviors across many areas of functioning including language, social behavior, play, academics and adaptive skills. The methodology appears particularly efficacious for children with autism. In this review of research…

The purpose of the current investigation was to determine if the experimental analysis of antecedent variables conducted in English and in Spanish would identify effective and ineffective instructions for response accuracy for Spanish-speaking English language learners. An antecedent variable (i.e., directive complexity) arranged in a hierarchical…

The aim of this study was to show how general models of text production can account for argumentative text planning. It focuses in particular on retrieval process in 11- to 18-year-old children. Various experimental situations were designed to promote different ways of retrieving ideas from long-term memory. Essays written by students were…

The purpose of this article is to identify the perceptual skills of expert teachers and offer suggestions for teachers to learn to see like an expert. Being able to perceptively read the critical cues in a learning environment allows teachers to recognize present problems, anticipate potential problems, link immediate problems with previously…

Interactional ethnography with a social constructionist perspective was used as an orienting theoretical framework to investigate how a community of learners was constructed in a postsecondary distance education class. The question guiding this research was: How do the interactions of the participants in an on-line classroom construct the social…

Purpose: This study investigated formant frequencies for their role as acoustic and perceptual correlates to the place of articulation of Cantonese final stops produced by profoundly hearing impaired speakers. Method: Speakers were 10 Cantonese adolescents (mean age = 13;5 [years;months]) who were profoundly hearing impaired (HI). Control speakers…

The increasing availability and performance of computer-based testing has prompted more research on the automatic assessment of language and speaking proficiency. In this investigation, we evaluated the feasibility of using an off-the-shelf speech-recognition system for scoring speaking prompts from the LanguEdge field test of 2002. We first…

A behavioral treatment program was used to improve the functional skills of a 12-year-old anoxic child. Neuropsychological test results indicated marked amnesia and global cognitive deficits. Functionally, self-care tasks could be performed, but only with verbal and physical prompting. Introduction of a monetary reward system significantly reduced…

Cloze procedure, a testing method which systematically deletes words in written prose and then measures the accuracy of the information is reviewed from a historical viewpoint. Redundancy is placed in a verbal context and can be noted on three separate levels of language: (1) surface syntactic structure; (2) deep syntactic structure; and (3)…

This paper isolates and examines separately three distinct sources of error in essay scores: lack of agreement between raters; inconsistencies in performance within mode of discourse, and inconsistencies in performance between modes of discourse. Essay prompts in the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Writing Supplement were designed to assess…

Effects of embedded (appropriately positioned within text) and intact (outline format) headings on the processing of ecological and geological text material were examined in two separate studies. Suggesting that outlines may provide readers with global information about a passage and that embedded headings may aid in discovering relationships…