Generalization probes conducted preceding and following social skills training (using a game format) of high school students with mild mental retardation found acquisition of social skills across game conditions. Although immediate generalization to nontraining environments did not occur, a possible "deferred generalization" effect was found at…

Recent experimental research is synthesized to identify distinctive biobehavioral characteristics of Down's Syndrome persons across their lifespan. It is argued that educational and other intervention programs have not demonstrated strong gains having significant durability or generalization. Recommended is an interactionist function-structure…

A constant-time-delay procedure was used to teach a generalized response to the lures of strangers to four preschool children with disabilities. Only after also providing in vivo training did instruction result in acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of the response with novel lures, strangers, and sites. (Author/DB)

A cognitive, nonintrusive method of controlling head-rocking behavior in an 11-year-old blind subject involved having the boy place his hand on his cheek or chin when prompted that he was rocking his head. The subject demonstrated significant decreases in head rocking during intervention and generalization during followup. (Author/JDD)

Learners must acquire a general strategic orientation in their problem solving, to determine what counts as relevant information in problematic situations. A dynamic systems approach is called for in determining whether general or context-specific instructions are needed to promote transfer of relevant information to novel conditions. (Author/JDD)

Three mothers of children (ages 4-9) who had disabilities and exhibited serious behavior management problems were taught child management techniques and planned activities techniques, using in-home coaching and written prompts for use in generalization settings. Results suggested that such training is effective but needs to be individualized.…

Three adult subjects with mild mental retardation were trained in individualized social skills and then taught to self-monitor their behavior, initially using a self-monitoring device. Self-monitoring assisted in generalization of trained social skills across settings and people; however, maintenance results were variable. (Author/DB)

Assessment reforms might fail because high stakes will be attached to them too soon, judgments will be unreliable, and lawsuits will occur. Educators need to consider technical issues including score reliability, task validity, portfolio sampling, and generalizability problems. U.S. schools would improve considerably if national Advanced Placement…

PhD and EdD dissertations were compared for research design, statistics, target populations, significance of results, age of subjects, and other characteristics. Analysis of 1,007 PhD and 960 EdD dissertations found PhD dissertations had more multivariate statistics and wider generalizability. EdD dissertations were more prevalent in educational…

Evaluation of a self-operated auditory prompting system with four adolescents with moderate or severe mental handicaps found the students could successfully use the system in learning a task in one setting and could generalize use of the prompting system to the same task in another setting and to a somewhat different task in the original setting.…

A 10-year-old autistic child was trained to imitate verbal prompts describing the child's motor responses. When intervention was introduced in the form of a gradual delay in the presentation of the verbal prompts, the child's spontaneous speech on trained items increased. Generalization and maintenance were analyzed. (Author/JDD)

The terms generalization and abstraction are used with various shades of meaning by mathematicians and mathematics educators. Introduced is the idea of "generic abstraction" that gives the student an operative sense of a mathematical concept and provides a passage point in the process toward formal abstraction. (MDH)

Offers a detailed lesson plan for a computer-equipped writing class, featuring the Daedalus Interchange program and a set of goals and activities for teaching synthesis, generalization, and the value of multiple "voices." (SR)

Incidental teaching and traditional discrete-trial procedures were used to teach two children (ages 10 and 12) with autism the expressive use of two color adjectives. Results demonstrated that traditional discrete-trial teaching was more efficient and produced faster acquisition but incidental teaching resulted in greater generalization and equal…

This response to Chandler et al. (EC 604 147) suggests that generalization of social competence training be viewed from both functional and topographical perspectives which have scientific and practice biases, respectively. The paper proposes a generalization-discrimination continuum along which behaviors may be placed for optimum utility. (DB)