Interviews with 19 adolescents attending the Indiana University Summer Arts Institute examined their perceptions concerning their early art talent, adult and peer encouragement, positions in their families, future expectations, interest in creating art, living environments, familiarity with artists, schooling, and art abilities. Gender…

Describes a system that performs automatic summaries of news from a large commercial news service encompassing 41 different publications. This system was compared to a system that used only the lead sentences of the texts. Lead-based summaries significantly outperformed the sentence-selection summaries. (AEF)

This study examined effects of visual impairment on the performance of typical educational tasks requiring visual accommodation to print material at three different distances. Subjects were 18 visually impaired and 19 nonimpaired children (ages 6-10). Findings indicated that visually impaired children exhibited more fixation shifts per task.…

This study of 570 children (age 9) in the Netherlands found that the presence and severity of minor neurological dysfunction was significantly related to poor performance on standardized reading, spelling, and arithmetic tests and to a lesser extent was related to ratings of distractible behavior. (Author/JDD)

Two groups of 10 adult aphasics received auditory-verbal "yes-no" questions, including egocentric, environmental, pictorial, and relationship items, either in a consistent order or random order. Support was found for the existence of a hierarchy of difficulty among the types of questions, but there was no significant difference between…

Describes the ideas and principles involved in the Management Charter Initiative work on management competence in the United Kingdom. Occupational standards and the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) are discussed; units of performance and performance criteria are described; and personal competence and developing competence are considered.…

Twenty learning-disabled students (grades 5 and 6) who received procedural facilitation for narrative composition, including story grammar cue cards and a metacognitive check-off procedure, produced better quality stories than a control group of 10 students. Including verbal reminders to develop characters did not affect story quality. (Author/JDD)

This study with 56 students (mean age 15 years) with mental retardation and 53 nonretarded students (matched for mental age) found that students with mental retardation were more likely to rely on all kinds of external cues (task-relevant, incidental, or misleading) in problem solving, especially when the preceding task had been difficult.…

This study, involving 26 children (ages 44-70 months) with impairments in grammar and phonology, found that children receiving either a clinician-administered or parent-administered intervention showed gains in expressive grammar, but there were no indirect effects on subjects' phonological production. Language intervention approaches for young…

This paper examines the educational relevance for students with profound disabilities of being at risk for poor nutrition and for problems caused by the nontherapeutic effects of some medications. Two classroom-based cases describe the resolution of a nutritional and a medication problem, including the role of the teacher and health-related…

External memory strategies were investigated in 45 children (age 11) with mild mental retardation and children (ages 7 and 11) without mental retardation. In contrast to expected deficiencies in the use of strategies, results showed areas of overlap in strategy capabilities among the groups. (Author/DB)

A 2-part survey of 24 mentally retarded individuals from supported and competitive employment programs across New South Wales, Australia, found that parents and families play a significant role as advocates/benefactors in subjects' lives and that such support was correlated to lower support needs and better work performance at the job site.…

This study of four moderately to severely aphasic subjects found that success in manual sign training programs is related to severity of aphasia, that aphasic subjects' propositional use of manual signs rarely follows simple acquisition, and that generalization to untrained stimuli or environments does not occur without additional training.…

Two causal models are presented to describe influences on the performance of students with learning disabilities. The first model associates reading and math with three domains: neuropsychological, linguistic, and social-behavioral. The second model involved relationships among selected individual variables and suggests that learning disability is…

Examined the hypothesis that processes other than those related to concepts about ability produce helplessness in children younger than 10. Found that eight year olds did not experience helplessness in response to feedback about their failure in an achievement task but did experience helplessness when they failed to perform a physical task. (MM)