In "The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools" (Brookings, 2002), the authors and their colleagues reported that attending a private school had no discernible impact, positive or negative, on the test scores of non-African-American students participating in school voucher programs in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Dayton, Ohio.…

This paper reports early findings from a wider study that sought to test the hypothesis that differences in language use exist between children who have a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and their non-ADHD peers. Twenty-two, 8 to 12 year-old children (11 with a diagnosis of ADHD and 11 matched peers) comprised the…

Background: Randomized control trials and the use of meta-analysis in systematic reviews are the basis of evidence-based practice. The paper reviews their use in the development of evidence-based practice in speech and language therapy. Aims: It is accepted that clinical outcome research should develop in a sequence of phases. A model of this…

Obesity has a negative impact upon mortality and morbidity. Studies report that obesity is more prevalent in individuals with Down syndrome than individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) not associated with Down syndrome. However, there have been no studies using a methodology of matched comparison groups and findings from previous studies…

The conventional way to measure program impacts is to compute the average treatment effect; that is, the difference between a treatment group that received some intervention and a control group that did not. Recently, scholars have recognized that looking only at the average treatment effect may obscure impacts that accrue to subgroups. In an…

The authors evaluated the effectiveness of the Skilled Counselor Training Model (SCTM; M. H. Smaby, C. D. Maddux, E. Torres-Rivera, & R. Zimmick, 1999) in teaching counseling skills and in fostering counselor cognitive complexity. Counselor trainees who completed the SCTM had better counseling skills and higher levels of cognitive complexity than…

A group with closed head injury was compared to neurologically intact controls regarding the referential cohesion and logical coherence of narrative production. A sample of six stories was obtained with tasks of cartoon-elicited story-telling and auditory-oral retelling. We found deficits in the clinical group with respect to referential cohesion,…

The executive function theory was utilized to examine the relationship between cognitive process and the restricted, repetitive symptoms of Autistic Disorder (AD). Seventeen adults with AD were compared to 17 nonautistic controls on a new executive function battery (Delis-Kaplin Executive Function Scales). Restricted, repetitive symptoms were…

Once considered an adult onset disease, type 2 diabetes is increasingly being diagnosed in low-income Mexican American children. Studies have suggested that most of those so diagnosed were overweight, reported low levels of physical activity, and were generally unaware of their disease. The Bienestar Health Program was designed to reduce risk…

The prenatal and neonatal factors of 225 children diagnosed with Autistic Disorder were compared with those of 1580 typically developing children. Each of the neonatal factors was compared between the Autistic Disorder and control groups, and between males and females. The results showed that males in the "Autistic Disorder" group had a…

In a recently developed in vitro analog of appetitive classical conditioning of feeding in "Aplysia," the unconditioned stimulus (US) was electrical stimulation of the esophageal nerve (En). This nerve is rich in dopamine (DA)-containing processes, which suggests that DA mediates reinforcement during appetitive conditioning. To test this…

We tested the hypothesis that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is important for complex associative learning by restricting rats from entering REM sleep for 4 h either immediately after training on an eight-box spatial task (0-4 REMr) or 4 h following training (4-8 REMr). Both groups of REM-restricted rats eventually reached the same overall…

Absolute auditory thresholds, frequency resolution and temporal resolution develop with age. It is still discussed whether low-level auditory performance is of clinical significance--specifically, for delayed maturation of central auditory processing. Recently, five new auditory tasks were used to study the development of low-level auditory…

Purpose: We determine the main outcome effects of a 12-month computer-mediated automated interactive voice response (IVR) intervention designed to assist family caregivers managing persons with disruptive behaviors related to Alzheimer's disease (AD). Design and Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled study of 100 caregivers, 51 in the usual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the impact on resource use of providing case managers with information on the potential for patients to benefit from home care services. Design and Methods: Twenty-four case managers working in the Arizona Long Term Care System (ALTCS) were randomized into treatment and control groups. Members of…