Fifty states and five territories were surveyed to determine implementation of the federal Program for Infants and Toddlers with Handicaps, established through Public Law 99-457. Questions focused on the states' interagency coordinating councils, definitions of developmental delay, and activities related to the required minimal components of…

Recent developments in medical technology have increased survival rates of children with disabling conditions and chronic illnesses. These children incur direct and indirect medical costs, and existing private and public resources leave gaps in payment and service delivery. New systems are necessary to ensure coordinated community care for all…

Six adults with both autism and moderate/profound mental retardation were assessed in a controlled environment for changes in frequency of maladaptive and stereotypic behaviors following nonexercise activities, general motor training activities, and aerobic exercise. Although antecedent aerobic exercise reduced undesirable behaviors, general motor…

This paper reviews the popular myths and facts about handwriting instruction and handwriting difficulties, examining two of the most common problems leading to difficulties with handwriting (dyslexia and dysgraphia). The paper also provides suggestions for helping students with handwriting difficulties. (SM)

Discusses a cooperative effort to solve the articulation problems among participating institutions of higher education and to dispel the stereotypes impeding these efforts. Participants value highly the collegial exchange afforded by the project and feel that the project reduced their professional isolation. Teachers instituted changes in…

A study involving 51 female undergraduate students compared abilities of dysphoric and intermittently dysphoric students to nondysphoric students performing a game requiring eye-hand coordination. More negative self-evaluations of dysphoric and intermittently dysphoric students' own performance are considered in terms of theories of depression.…

Discusses efforts of states to develop plans to implement the Child Care and Development Block Grant and reexamine and strengthen state child care policies. Describes plans from four states. Lists key elements for an effective early childhood development system. (SH)

This study assessed the behavior of 41 4-through 8-year-olds with Williams syndrome. As expected, socialization and communication were relative strengths, whereas daily living skills and motor skills were relative weaknesses. Within socialization, interpersonal skills were stronger than play/leisure or coping skills. Adaptive behavior was not…

Five days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, a convoy of 142 air-conditioned school buses from the 209,000-student Texas district rumbled to life. Loaded with food and bottled water, staffed by 350 school employees, and accompanied by bus-repair trucks and a phalanx of school police cars, the yellow buses traveled all night to reach the…

In the present study, an attempt was made to examine the nature and persistence of bilateral transfer of a throwing skill for a large sample of male and female children. One hundred sixty children ages 6, 8, 10, and 12 years were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group with an equal number of boys and girls in each group. The…

Despite intensive work on language-brain relations, and a fairly impressive accumulation of knowledge over the last several decades, there has been little progress in developing large-scale models of the functional anatomy of language that integrate neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and psycholinguistic data. Drawing on relatively recent…

There is a long-standing debate in the area of speech production on the question of whether only words selected for articulation are phonologically activated (as maintained by serial-discrete models) or whether this is also true for their semantic competitors (as maintained by forward-cascading and interactive models). Past research has addressed…

Many studies of the neural mechanisms of learning have focused on habituation, a simple form of learning in which a response decrements with repeated stimulation. In the siphon-elicited siphon withdrawal reflex (S-SWR) of the marine mollusk "Aplysia," the prevailing view is that homosynaptic depression of primary sensory afferents underlies…

Consolidation theory proposes that through the synthesis of new proteins recently acquired memories are strengthened over time into a stable long-term memory trace. However, evidence has accumulated suggesting that retrieved memory is susceptible to disruption, seeming to consolidate again (reconsolidate) to be retained in long-term storage. Here…

In 1998 a Burlington, Vermont partnership of a branch of city government and several educational and environmental organizations received a "metro-grant" to develop a project for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under its Environmental Monitoring for Public Access and Community Tracking (EMPACT) Program. One goal was to…