This booklet discusses the importance to adolescents and adults with mental retardation of learning how to respond correctly to the many variations in home, work, and community activities in order to be successful in integrated settings. The difficulties individuals with mental retardation have in generalizing skills learned in one situation to a…

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating the benefits of repeated readings (RR) interventions at increasing students' fluency on intervention passages. Few studies however have examined the extent to which repeatedly reading one passage improves students' reading fluency on similar passages. Using an alternating treatment design, we examined the…

Proficiency with written expression is critical for students' academic success. Unfortunately, writing presents a challenge for both students and teachers. Recent data suggest that many students in U.S. schools fail to meet even the most basic writing standards. And even when students receive effective (i.e., evidence-based) writing instruction,…

This study examined the relationship between the metalinguistic reflections produced by French-speaking elementary school students and their actual learning of ESL. Using a before-after design, data was collected at the beginning (Time 1) and at the end (Time 2) of a 3-month period during which the participants kept a metalinguistic journal.…

The present study assessed the effects of summer parent tutoring on 3 children with learning disabilities using empirically derived reading interventions. Brief experimental analyses were used to identify customized reading fluency interventions. Parents were trained to use the intervention strategies with their children. Parents implemented the…

Researchers know little about whether very young children can recognize objects originally introduced to them in a picture book when they encounter similar looking objects in various real-world contexts. The present studies used an imitation procedure to explore young children's ability to generalize a novel action sequence from a picture book to…

Four preschool children (with and without disabilities), who often responded inappropriately to questions, participated in the current study. Pretest results were used to create sets of questions that the children either did or did not answer correctly (i.e., known and unknown questions). We then sequentially taught two different responses to a…

In contextualized instruction, the critical features of a context are considered important for the acquisition and transfer of a skill. Examples of contextualized instruction programs are Functional Context Education (FCE) and Anchored Instruction (AI). FCE involves the teaching of reading and mathematics skills in contexts that are relevant to…

Children's ability to make logical generalizations when their sex stereotyped expectations are challenged was assessed. Participants were 45 elementary school children ranging in age from 84 to 122 months, with an average age of 103 months. There were 22 males and 23 females in the sample. Activities were rated by college students as more likely…

The role of variation as a determinant of infant categorical responding was investigated in three studies of infants 7 to 7 1/2 months of age. Sixty-three infants, divided into groups of 21 each, were habituated to color slide poses of either one, two, or six different adult female faces. Their responses to a novel pose of a familiar face and a…

The study investigated whether a self control strategy training procedure was effective in improving compositions of two 12-year-old learning disabled students. Effects of training on three objective aspects of compositions (number of different action words, action helpers, and describing words) were investigated using a multiple baseline across…

Based on a PhD thesis, University of London, Institute of Education, 1965.

Research supported by Grants MH-11699-01 and NB-04268 from the U.S. Public Health Service.

The authors propose a system for determining which goals and target behaviors are of highest priority for handicapped students. In a meeting of the interdisciplinary treatment team, goals are set forth and ranked according to answers to a series of questions: (1) will acquiring the behavior increase the probability of the client living, being…

A study involving three profoundly retarded adults was designed to investigate the efficacy of a stair step diagonal training progression in promoting correct responses to untrained action-object verbal instructions. Procedures included pretraining assessment of action verbs and nouns, matrix training in which each S was physically put through the…