A modified incidental-teaching procedure was used to increase the receptive language skills of two autistic youths with previous institutionalization. Percentage of correct, unprompted object identifications increased when the incidental-teaching package (gestural prompts, behavior-specific praise, and contingent access to lunch-making supplies)…

Three profoundly retarded adults who were taught action-object responses learned the verbal elements in the instructions they were directly taught and responded to these elements in novel recombined instructions. (Author/CL)

The authors review research on promoting positive social behavior of severely handicapped students and analyze the research in terms of those factors that have been found to influence generalization. Practical implications are drawn regarding ways to better foster generalization of the positive social behaviors of severely handicapped students.…

Imitative responding was first established and then reinforced only in the presence of one stimulus and not in the presence of another. Subjects were three institutionalized, severely subnormal boys. (Author)

The purposes of this paper are to identify common errors made by researchers when dealing with reliability coefficients and to outline best practices for reporting and interpreting reliability coefficients. Common errors that researchers make are: (1) stating that the instruments are reliable; (2) incorrectly interpreting correlation coefficients;…

The jackknife, as refined by J. Tukey (1958), is a valuable tool for the internal replication of a study. The jackknife statistic is particularly useful with small sample sizes. Large samples are labor intensive, and other methods better address this situation. The jackknife procedure involves the use of a single sample drawn from a normally…

Reviews research on overcorrection, a behavior reduction procedure, and considers its applications to special education in terms of punishment aspects and effects on generalization and maintenance. Advantages (including its effectiveness) as well as disadvantages (such as the length of time it requires) are pointed out. (CL)

When research focuses on the conditions of measurement, the dimensions of the measurement design should be transposed to differentiate conditions while generalizing over persons. To clarify this transposition, the notions of face of differentiation and face of generalization are introduced as complementary aspects of the design. An example is…

The effect of typicality of category exemplars on naming was investigated using a single subject experimental design across participants and behaviors in four patients with fluent aphasia. Patients trained on naming of atypical exemplars demonstrated generalization to naming of intermediate and typical items. However, patients trained on typical…

Conducted a reliability generalizability study on the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (CSEI; S. Coopersmith, 1967) to examine the variability of reliability estimates across studies and to identify study characteristics that may predict this variability. Results show that reliability for CSEI scores can vary considerably, especially at the…

Conducted a reliability generalization study on Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale (M. Zuckerman and others, 1964) using 113 reliability coefficients from 21 published studies. The reliability of scores was marginal for four of the five scales, and low for the other. Mean age of subjects has a significant relationship with score reliability. (SLD)

Examines the extent to which curriculum-based measurement (CBM) survey-level mathematics assessment varies as a function of type of survey-level assessment used and the generalizability of results. Results of a generalizability analysis suggest that for single-skill survey-level CBM math assessments, the administration of one single-skill math…

Conducted three studies to examine what segment of counseling interview best represents entire interview and whether different starting points yield different results. Results suggest that, whereas starting points make little difference, generalizing from any size segment to whole session should not be done when examining interviews individually.…