Since 1990, Vermont legislation has required all schools to establish an Educational Support System (ESS) that provides a comprehensive set of supports and services designed to meet the needs of students with disabilities as well as those at risk of school failure. Given the need to promote the success of an increasingly heterogeneous group of…

Background: This report describes a cognitive behavioural group intervention for women with mild and borderline intellectual disabilities detained in a secure hospital setting because of their fire-setting behaviour. The study aimed to examine participants' motivations for setting fires, their responses to an intervention designed specifically for…

This article describes The Community Perinatal Care Study, a community-based study of pregnancy support that was conducted in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, between 2001 and 2004. The study was conducted to learn how to improve community-based pregnancy care and to improve prenatal care and healthy births, particularly for women with increased…

We have previously reported in this journal that spatial ability influences academic performance in engineering. We have also reported that spatial ability is trainable, and can be increased through instruction focused on using perception and mental imagery in three-dimensional representation. In this article, we present the results of a…

Background: The "circle of friends" is an educational approach that facilitates the inclusion of children with disabilities into the school community by engaging their peer group in supporting the individual proactively. The present small-scale study examines the efficacy of this intervention in improving the communication (and ultimately social)…

Background: The study concerns the unknown value of group instruction for mothers of young children with Down syndrome (DS) in preventing or minimizing sleep problems. Method: (1) Children with DS were randomly allocated to an Instruction group (given basic information about children's sleep) and a Control group for later comparison including…

This survey, with its 85% response rate, provides an extensive profile of drinking behaviors and predictors of drinking among 3406 members of one national college fraternity, distributed across 98 chapters in 32 states. Multiple indexes of alcohol consumption measured frequency, quantity, estimated blood alcohol concentration levels (BACs), and…

The amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1997 (IDEA '97) established a number of expectations regarding how the behavioral needs of students with disabilities would be met and how they should be disciplined. These expectations included alternative behavioral assessment strategies (e.g., functional behavioral assessments,…

Introduction: The objectives of continuing medical education (CME) programs include knowledge acquisition, skill development, clinical reasoning and decision making, and health care outcomes. We conducted a yearlong medical education research study in which knowledge acquisition in our CME programs was assessed. Method: A randomized…

This study examined the effects of a systematic, phonics-based reading intervention on the oral reading fluency and accuracy of adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) receiving educational services in a juvenile correctional facility. A multiple-baseline design across four participants was used to calculate the effect of daily,…

This study tested a partial version of R. W. Lent, S. D. Brown, and G. Hackett's (1994) social-cognitive career theory model. Among 204 high school girls who attended science, math, and engineering (SME) career conferences, the authors used a 4-year longitudinal design to predict the choice of an SME college major and SME self-efficacy and outcome…

An increasing number of children and young people are being excluded from school as a direct result of anger management problems. The research literature suggests that short cognitive-behavioural intervention programmes may be effective in helping young people understand and control their anger. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the…

Twenty-nine years ago Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (MLSPC) was launched at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. It was one of the first prospective longitudinal studies of how parent-infant attachment develops, how it changes over time, and how the quality of attachment in infancy influences…

"Disruptive" vocal behaviour is common in nursing homes, but presents significant management challenges. Non-pharmacological approaches have been found to be effective and preferable interventions in such situations. A case study is presented of an 85-year-old woman who displayed frequent screaming and calling out during personal care…

The fact that children growing up in poverty are likely to be in the lower ranges of achievement on standardised literacy tests is not a new phenomenon. Internationally there are a myriad of intervention and remedial programmes designed to address this problem with a range of effects. Frequently, sustainable reforms are curtailed by deficit views…