Responds to letters from readers in response to recent "Research" columns. Deals with the issues of learning disabilities, whole language approach, the "skills" perspective, junk food textbooks, and punctuation. (RS)

Criticisms of traditional approaches to the assessment of student abilities and instructional program design are reviewed and alternative, dynamic approaches are suggested. A major feature of the suggested approaches is assistance to influence student performance and thus reveal the potential for change. The approaches are categorized and examined…

Administered Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery (WLPB) to 18 learning-disabled adolescents from culturally variant population in rural southern Louisiana and to matched group of normal achievers. Found group status to have significant effect on cluster scores. Results suggest that WLPB may be useful for culturally diverse students when…

Discusses the Xerox/Kurzweil Personal Reader which is an advanced optical scanner that reads a greater range of typeset or typewritten text than its predecessors, and converts it into highly naturalistic speech. (MG)

Experimental studies and clinical observations have indicated that right-hemisphere lesions produce impulsive talkative behavior. An exploratory study was conducted to investigate whether right-cerebral dysfunction would be evident in the intelligence test scores of talkative students with learning disabilities. The study with 28 children (ages…

Compared Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) tests and retest scores for 322 learning disabled children over three years for factor structure and structure stability. Results suggest that WISC-R factor structure was stable over three years. Coefficients of congruence indicated factorial similarity between groups of Black and…

Comparison of scores on the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised of 67 students (ages 6-12) referred for possible learning disabilities found strong relationships among all the global standard scores on both instruments with different score patterns for those with severe disabilities.…

Twenty language-disordered and 20 nonimpaired children, aged 9-11, performed story generation and story retelling tasks. For both groups, retold narratives were longer and contained more story grammar components and complete episode structures. Clause length differentiated story generation from story retelling for the language-disordered children…

Evaluation of school records of 379 students, ages 6-12 years, referred for possible learning disability (LD) placement found that more than 80 percent of the referred students were placed in LD classes and that two-thirds of those referred scored below the severe discrepancy cutoff on the aptitude-achievement formula. (Author/DB)

Students (N=225) from three different facilities diagnosed as learning disabled were studied to determine the frequency of adoption with this population as compared to the national norm. The frequency of adoption was found to be 4.5 times higher than the norm, that is, 17.3 percent versus 3.9 percent. Possible reasons are discussed. (Author)

Examined relationship of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Revised), (WISC-R), and the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery (W-JPB), Part Two, using children (N=34) with learning disabilities. Found more consistent relationships between WISC-R and W-JPB Achievement tests than…

The study examined the relationship between proximity of critical textual information and selected metacognitive behaviors of 29 elementary-age subjects. Subjects receiving collapsed versions of passages reported use of higher percentages of text-based strategies, whereas over 50 percent of the responses of subjects receiving the dispersed text…

Among findings of a comparison of 74 learning disabled college freshmen and non-handicapped peers on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Revised, were no significant differences between verbal and performance scale discrepancies, more variable subtest performances by LD students, and lower mean scores by LD students. (Author/DB)

Discusses learning disabilities in light of Gerald Cole's book "The Learning Mystique: A Critical Look at Learning Disabilities" and in the humorous guise of being diagnosed by a learning disabilities expert as having a neurological dysfunction due to a lack of interest in watching football. (RS)

The investigation of cognitive factors responsible for the arithmetic learning problems of fifth graders found that children with arithmetic learning problems were characterized by very slow operation execution. No support was found for theories that inefficient number encoding or inappropriate strategies are characteristic of this population.…