The paper reviews the literature on use of computers with retarded students in three chapters dealing respectively with the historical context, current issues, and future directions. The chapter on the historical context reviews research on the efficacy of teaching machines with this population. Research on the effectiveness of computer-assisted…

This study explored the effects of type of behavioral treatment and living environment on college students' (N=216) person-perceptions and causal attributions of deviant behaviors of a 17-year-old with mental retardation or normal intelligence. The results suggested that positive behavioral approaches and normalized community settings, at least as…

Three types of lay theories about the social world form a developmental sequence. Earlier developing theories are reorganized at the next level into a more inclusive, encompassing view of the world in order to make better predictions. The absolute thinker sees the world as fixed and unchanging, reasons with absolute rules, and has a narrow world…

This study compares the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (MSCA) and the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) profiles of successful and unsuccessful preschoolers with learning disabilities. Subjects, 40 preschool students, were tested at the beginning and at the end of the preschool year and were placed into repeating or…

This study is a review of trends in information-handling technology and significant developments which are changing or will change the general environment within which archivists and records managers in international organizations will have to work. Trends in microelectronics, electronic storage, software, data transmission, computer architecture,…

Research on intelligent tutoring seeks to develop systems for automating education and to explore epistemological issues concerning the nature of the knowledge presented by tutors and how that knowledge can be learned. The ACT theory of skill acquisition and its successor (PUPS--PenUltimate Production System) provides production-system models of…

Psychologists and educators interested in factors that might influence mathematical ability have examined intelligence, motivation, and attitudes toward mathematics. More recently, sex role and cognitive style have entered the picture. The relationships among intelligence, field dependence, sex role, mathematics background, and mathematical…

The revised version of this monograph serves two purposes: (1) to describe what the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) measures with regard to reading/learning disability in the light of current findings, and (2) to summarize research with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and WISC-R as related to…

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), one of the most commonly used tests of cognitive ability, is difficult to administer accurately. The purpose of this study was primarily to assess interrater agreement on the WISC-R Administration Observational Checklist (WAOC), a new observational instrument that can be used by an…

This investigation examined the effects of mediation and Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores on conceptual learning for black college students. It was predicted that higher IQ scoring subjects would not outperform lower IQ scoring subjects under nonmediated learning conditions but would significantly outperform lower IQ scoring subjects under…

This paper reviews the history of the placement of mentally retarded students during the first half of this century. In 1900, it was generally assumed that custodial care of feebleminded persons was necessary to protect society. Severely retarded students were regularly excluded from public school attendance. Soon school officials began adopting…

Adverse effects of material rewards on Wechsler subscale performance may be the result of a reward-produced developmental regression. To further explore that idea through replicating earlier findings with adults, and to extend the enquiry to children, selected Wechsler subscales were administered to 32 subjects at each of three ages (5, 10, and 18…

This paper describes how a language for building information systems that is being developed by the Office for Research at OCLC can be linked to an artificial intelligence environment, Poplog. The demonstration system--ISIS (Intelligent Support for Interface systems)--shows how Poplog could provide some intelligent support for a D interface,…

This paper discusses the relationship between the mediation of task performance by some structure that is not inherent in the task domain itself and the phenomenon of automatization, in which skilled performance becomes effortless or phenomenologically "automatic" after extensive practice. The use of a common simple explicit mediating…

The literature on instructional design argues that curricula, educational materials, and instructional strategies are best created using a systems approach, and models for the systematic design of educational programs have proliferated over the past decade. However, these models are prescriptive and not based on research into how designers…