Examines relationship between psychological assessment and academic performance within framework of the largest residential facility for the mentally retarded in the world, Willowbrook State School, made possible by analysis of requests for psychological reevaluation of patients made by institution's Education Department. (Author)

The study, exploring affective attitudes toward the past, present, and future, found that youthful offenders were oriented primarily toward the future and past rather than the present. Attitudes toward the future were positive while the past and present were regarded negatively. (Author)

Opinions of the Supreme Court are presented on the case of Youngberg v. Romeo, in which the mother of a mentally retarded institutionalized adult petitioned for her son's rights under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to safe conditions of confinement, freedom from bodily restraints, and habilitation. (CL)

Observational data collected on 50 severely/profoundly retarded adolescents revealed that subjects received almost no individual staff member attention; that subjects interacted or were in close proximity with other subjects approximately 54 percent of the time; and that the group size or composition has less relationship to the subjects' behavior…

Opinions were received from over 73 percent of superintendents on feasibility of deinstitutionalization cost-benefit issues, service perspectives, and support for deinstitutionalization. Most respondents believed parents are less than supportive of deinstitutionalization. Superintendents were pessimistic about acceptance of institutional…

Based on data reported in 1978, the study was designed to obtain descriptive data on 474 individuals released from 75 public residential facilities for the mentally retarded. (SW)

Although status offenders (young people defined as incorrigible, runaways, or truants) have often been abused previously, their placement in hospital psychiatric wards constitutes further abuse. Insecure, insufficiently trained hospital staffers are one of the major problems that perpetuates the cycle of provocation and punishment in…

Argues that adolescents are not always psychologically mature enough to decide whether or not they need psychiatric treatment. Says that the role of the court should be to assure that adolescents receive adequate treatment, rather than to assure that they consent to treatment. (Author/GC)

Results demonstrated that when compared with normally developing children of the same mental age, the Down's syndrome Ss (6 to 12 years old) evidenced a more homogeneous pattern of syntactic usage and tended to acquire only low-level syntactic structures, as identified by the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure. (Author)

Reviews children's rights since the Supreme Court's decision that parents retain a substantial, if not the dominant, role in institutionalizing children. (Author/DB)

Thirty-five institutionalized, mentally retarded individuals (17 to 47 years old) navigated an obstacle course while viewing through an optical prism that displaced the visual field (visual-motor rearrangement). The degree of adaptation to visual-motor rearrangement was assessed and compared with scores on a research version of the Adaptive…