This final report describes activities of a federally funded project which developed an educational computer-assisted instructional program for persons with severe disabilities. A preliminary review of the literature identified specific inadequacies of most software for this population, such as: too few examples of a task or concept thus limiting…

This study investigated the effects of K. J. Klauer's (1989) inductive reasoning training program of teaching children. Effects of training and the range of transfer of the training were assessed. The subjects were 34 third-grade Dutch children of average ability, matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children from the training condition (N=17) received…

Three studies of five seventh-grade students (ages 12-14) with emotional disturbances were conducted to determine whether a stimulus class would emerge as a result of one conditional discrimination training using direct instruction (implemented with a constant time delay) augmented with instructive feedback. The students were taught to identify…

This paper explores the use of a peer coaching model, the Collaborative Learning Process (CLP), to increase the application of content from inservice teacher training. Educators (N=40) of students with moderate to severe disabilities were trained in the use of CLP to encourage application of the newly trained skill of facilitating skill…

Three studies were conducted to explore the relationship between social skills instruction and the maintenance and generalization of skills to post-school environments. Three adult women with severe disabilities in their last year of school participated in the studies. The first study addressed the effectiveness of an instructional package to…

This final report describes activities of the 3-year Generalized InService Training (GIST) Project to develop and field test an inservice training model for educators serving children with moderate, severe, and profound handicaps. Critical elements of the approach are identified, including: (1) training of educators and supervisors to work…

Three factors tend to remove classroom teachers from any direct benefits from formal research: (1) the difficulty of replicating the exact circumstances of the study in the classroom; (2) the scarcity of research which claims to show a "significant difference"; and (3) the complexity of reporting, in formal research journals and reports,…

The paper addresses behavior management strategies for developing new behaviors in special needs learners, strategies for changing existing behaviors, and strategies for developing behavioral generalization. An introductory overview identifies five basic principles of behavior management. Fourteen behavioral terms are then defined (e.g.,…

Computer learners often develop explanations of events they observe during training. Recent work on generalization suggests that explanations may be valuable in permitting learners to develop generalizations from one or a few examples. This study explores the idea by describing four generalization paradigms in which explanations play a part:…

A dominant theme in cognitive psychology is that prior knowledge in long-term memory has a strong influence on an individual's cognitive processing. Citing numerous memory studies with children, knowledge base effects are presented as part of a broader picture of memory development. Using the sort/recall procedure (asking subjects to group sets of…

There is some confusion in discriminating basic educational research (which explores the why's and how's of learning) from applied research (which seeks to test the implications of basic research results) because some investigations are conceived without a clear purpose. Thus, it is not uncommon for researchers to suggest implications that…

The cross-levels hypothesis is presented as an explanation for program evaluation failures. It states that the usefulness of evaluation data as feedback for decision making varies inversely with the number of organizational levels between the action the data describe, and the decisions they are intended to influence. To be useful for decision…

The purpose of the project was to develop and evaluate a training program in self regulatory skills with approximately 40 trainable mentally retarded students (TMR) (mean age 18 years) and to determine the effect of the acquired self regulatory skills on task performance and self concept. In Phase 1, six preliminary studies attempted to determine…

This research report outlines progress made in the development of a conceptual framework (called "crystallization") which is intended to explain the conditions found to be critical to the child's potential for developmental change. The research completed and proposed on crystallization has centered around four main areas of activity: (1)…

Ten schizophrenic and autistic children who exhibited self destructive, tantrum, echolalic, and self stimulatory behaviors were treated by reinforcement therapy. Reinforcement withdrawal, in the form of interpersonal isolation contingent upon self-destruction, and electrical shocks served to extinguish these behaviors in some children.…