A study involving 215 hearing-impaired students and 63 mathematics teachers concluded that student background factors and the quality of instruction a hearing-impaired student receives are primary determinants of achievement in mainstreamed settings. Mainstreaming with an interpreter was found to have no specific effect on achievement for…

Family preservation services to decrease the use of foster care and to preserve maltreating families at high risk of child placement are examined, in the context of studies of the helping alliance and its relationship to treatment outcome. (DB)

Expert systems technology was applied to placement decisions of deaf and hard-of-hearing children. The application involved developing a model of how experts make placement decisions. The decisions of the expert system were found to agree with those of a majority of teachers in 90% of the cases. (DB)

The effect of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) specific sentence-level errors was examined using 18 randomly chosen essays representing the range of ESL writing found in most large testing situations. Results suggest that graders with insufficient training in evaluating ESL essays differ in their judgment of the weight assigned to ESL error,…

Recently, adoptive parents have successfully sued placement agencies for wrongful adoption or fraudulently misrepresenting or neglecting to give a child's medical or family history. Adoption agencies' policies about disclosing the medical and social history of adoptees have been cyclical and have developed because of specific social factors; such…

Untracking schools seek to reduce student isolation, expand student access to valued knowledge, and extend high expectations to all students. Innovative strategies and support programs, such as Parents and Counselors Together (PACT) and Achieving Via Individual Determination (AVID), can help close the gap between student aspirations and school…

Adults with mental retardation (n=392) involved in self-advocacy groups completed the Life Choices Survey. Findings indicated that this group indicated more choice opportunities than most adults with mental retardation and that total choice availability varied with level of disability and type of living arrangement but not by age or gender.…

In November 1992, Japanese Ministry of Education declared middle school teachers could no longer use distribution tables produced by private testing companies to predetermine high school students' curricula. Failure to implement reform stems from structural and cultural roots. By presorting students and molding their expectations, traditional…

Using data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study, this research investigated whether ability grouping level magnifies the effects of background differences on mathematics achievement for eighth-grade public school students. Students in high-ability groups viewed math more positively, exhibited more appropriate behavior in math class,…

Addresses the importance of vocational assessment for students with disabilities. Discusses the legislative and governmental impetus for the development of vocational assessment programs in the school. Presents some current vocational assessment models, including a transdisciplinary vocational assessment design, school-based models, and a…

Court-appointed child advocates, attorneys, guardians ad litem, and therapists (total n=116) made custody decisions and abuse likelihood ratings for children in one of two vignettes that varied as to whether mother or father was incompetent to parent without threat of further abuse. Decisions were not affected by sex role stereotypes,…

This report details results of providing gifted and talented middle school and early high school students with computer-based advanced placement courses in mathematics and physics. Three such groups in the Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University (California) were followed. Results support acceleration for such students and the…

An evaluation was conducted of community support services in Minnesota that provide treatment options to individuals with developmental disabilities who display behaviors that put them at risk of losing their current community placement and being placed in a large state facility. Evaluation results and the outreach service model are considered.…

Relationships among state identification rates for serious emotional disturbances and economic and demographic variables were explored. Variation in per pupil revenue explained about one-fourth of the variance in identification rates. States differed significantly based on region, elementary and secondary expenditure, per pupil revenue, and per…

This article discusses the need for a computerized information system to assist people with visual impairments in the United Kingdom in the job search process. Factors for consideration in designing such a database are discussed, and a program for development, evaluation, and implementation is proposed. (Author/DB)