A rationale is offered for including life skills in curricula for students with special needs. Life skills are defined as encompassing daily living, personal/social, and occupational skills. Daily living skills include: managing personal finances, selecting and managing a household, caring for personal needs, safety awareness, preparing and…

A unified conceptual model is needed to integrate the extensive research on (1) social competence and adaptive behavior, (2) converging conceptualizations of social adjustment and psychopathology, and (3) emerging concepts and measures of academic competence. To develop such a model, a study was conducted in which teacher ratings were collected on…

Fifteen author-contributed papers focus on the learning disabled adolescent and young adult. The first section provides a general overview while subsequent sections address educational and social techniques, steps to employment, and programs for adolescents. The following titles and authors are included: "Prevention: Primary, Secondary, or…

Practical or "tacit" knowledge has been argued to be critical for managerial success. Mentoring may be one way in which tacit knowledge is learned. This study examined the relationships of tacit knowledge, mentoring, gender, and competence. Subjects were managers (N=57) in a southern city. No significant gender differences were found on…

This paper proposes a dispositional conceptualization of communicative competence (explaining an individual's cross-contextual performance) that complements the situational approach which assumes competence is context-bound. Dispositional communicative competence is defined as a function of three dimensions (cognitive, affective, and behavioral)…

A demonstration program featured a mainstreamed setting for six hearing impaired children (five hard of hearing and one deaf) in 2nd and 3rd grades. A full time special education teacher used sign language and cotaught with the regular classroom teacher. Many of the problems encountered in the first year of the program were dealt with successfully…

A social curriculum package was developed for use in adjustment training centers that serve developmentally disabled clients over the age of 16 years. The curriculum features two different instructional styles (verbal instruction and role play) for nine task areas: (1) seeking attention, (2) complying, (3) telling the truth, (4) expressing…

Three basic approaches to discipline and child care are the obedience-oriented/punitive, the indulgent/permissive, and the person-enabling/justice approaches. The obedience-oriented/punitive approach, primarily concerned with obedience, sometimes uses praise and rewards manipulatively. When they fail, coercive punishment is used. The…

Examines the effectiveness of interpersonal skill training as a function of group size and training duration. Results indicate that group size has a significant effect on the dimension of empathic understanding. (Author/HMV)

A case is made for the utility and necessity of thorough behavioral analysis and description of developmentally disabled children using Wolfenberger's "Five Embarrassments in the Diagnostic Process" as a point of departure. (DB)

One hundred eleven subjects were asked to indicate how much relationship with people is involved in 48 occupational titles. The results support Roe's classification of occupations: differences within occupational fields were found to be smaller than differences between occupational fields (F=8.53, p less than .01). (Author)

Groups composed of members who were rated high in interpersonal skills are found to engage in significantly more personal discussion and feedback and less impersonal discussion than groups composed of members rated low in these skills. Groups receiving pretraining show similar differences when compared to no-pretraining controls. (Author)

Examination on degree of relationship orientation indicated that (a) counselors were more relationship-oriented than teachers or administrators, (b) teachers were more relationship-oriented than administrators, and (c) inexperienced educators were more relationship-oriented than experienced educators. (Author)

Perceptions of relational development were examined in this study. One hundred and five subjects designated and evaluated three relationships each--those with an acquaintance, a friend, and an intimate friend--producing a total of 247 existing relationships for study. The subjects' evaluations were assessed according to two main variables:…