Forty-two inner city intermediate-grade learning-disabled students wrote fables when provided with the following stimuli: story starter, story ending with story content, and story ending with rhetorical purpose. The story ending groups did more story development planning than the story starter group, but composition quality was not significantly…

Twenty-nine deaf students (ages three to five) were observed during outdoor free play. Children with higher language ability were more likely than other children to play with two other partners at once, interact with teachers, use language, prefer playing with children of similar language ability, and receive language from partners. (Author/PB)

Grade 6-7 learning-disabled students (n=21) and nonlearning-disabled students (n=13) completed the Test of Written Language story subtest, a book report assignment, and an interview concerning reported strategy use. Higher reported strategy use failed to correlate significantly with the quality of the final written products for either group.…

Fifteen students read expository texts and filled in deleted words and phrases. The five deaf high school youths reported using similar strategies as hearing elementary school youths and hearing reading-disabled high school youths, but deaf readers more often relied on rereading and background knowledge, whereas hearing readers more often used…

Examination of 23 4-year-old children classified otitis media negative or positive during their first year of life indicated that otitis positive children required a more advantageous signal-to-competition ratio for sentence intelligibility, compared to otitis-negative peers. No intergroup differences were found in receptive or expressive language…

This study explored the influences of social, psychological, and cultural determinants of underachievement as perceived by 148 intermediate grade African-American students in gifted, above average, or average academic programs. Psychological factors played the greatest role in underachievement or poor achievement motivation. Underachievement…

Junior high learning-disabled students (n=29) were taught U.S. states and capitals. Students scored higher on items taught mnemonically than on items taught traditionally, whether students were required to provide forward or backward information. Significant correlations were found between performance and reported mnemonic strategy usage.…

Investigates hypothesis that topic familiarity and assessed difficulty of a text correlate positively with performance on reading comprehension tests. A study of 177 advanced students of English for Specific Purposes indicates that students' subjective evaluation of the relative difficulty of a reading text is not always a reliable index of their…

Sixty-five persons with visual impairments were videotaped as they located and learned the arrangement of five objects in a novel space. Analysis of videotapes and verbal self-reports of the 15 best performing participants revealed that they implemented systematic perimeter and/or gridline patterns, utilized their canes efficiently, and…

This study of 36 backward readers (mean age=111 months) from the Netherlands determined that repeated reading-while-listening of the same text did not lead to better results (except in reading speed) than reading different texts, and asking readers to detect mismatches between written and spoken texts did not improve performance. (Author/JDD)

Performance of congenitally blind children and blindfolded children was compared on tasks requiring spatial reasoning and shape recognition. Blind subjects performed at least as well as blindfolded subjects on simple two-dimensional tactual processing tasks, but less well on more complex tasks requiring them to store, compare, and label objects.…

A survey of parents of 174 gifted students identified specific parenting skills that respondents felt had influenced their children's personal and social development. Skills identified included support and help; respect, valuing, honesty; praise, encouragement, rewards; strong work ethic and high expectations; love and affection; and communication…

Discusses factors influencing the survival of library schools and how innovation of curricular changes to expand programs and incorporate technologies affects continued feasibility. Findings indicate that public governance, bureaucratic entrenchment, institutional age, and moderation in innovation positively affect survival. (23 references) (EA)

Performance on measures of phonology, reading, and spelling was evaluated for subjects (including 20 preschoolers, 23 grade school children, 17 adolescents, and 17 adults). Subjects had a history of a preschool phonology disorder. Although relative performance improved across age groups, at each age group subjects performed more poorly than…

This article presents procedures, forms, and instructional techniques used to increase achievement of learning-disabled students through measuring and controlling task difficulty during classroom instruction time. These techniques are especially recommended for classrooms using individualization and small group instruction. (Author/PB)