Interviews with 24 children aged 9 to 13 about life with their younger siblings who had severe handicaps revealed a consistently high level of involvement and strong feelings of responsibility. While the children recognized the hardships engendered by their sibling's disability, they emphasized positive aspects of family life. (Author/JDD)

A study investigated support provided to target employees who have been competitively employed. Ten supervisors in businesses employing individuals with handicaps were interviewed. Supervisors' roles included hiring, modifying the job, providing training, assisting co-workers in providing employee support, evaluating employees, and providing…

Naturalistic and experimental study of the extent to which the use of the vocal prosody typical of motherese improved the responsiveness of children with severe developmental delays suggested that the use of such vocal prosody could help remediate unresponsiveness in severely handicapped learners. (RH)

Six suggested uses of videotape for communication with parents of children with severe disabilities include progress reports, individualized education program meetings, summer programming, integration activities, transition planning, and home use. Parents involved in these uses have reported increased understanding of their child's instruction and…

Describes an instructional program developed for children with severe disabilities. Discusses how the combined use of technology and child-centered instruction resulted in the active participation of these severely disabled students in reading and writing activities. (SR)

This study assessed the validity of idiosyncratic choice-making behaviors of three children with multiple disabilities. Children were given either their "choice" of food or drink or were given the opposite. Direct observations of children's acceptance or refusal revealed the children consistently indicated choices during both conditions.…

This article introduces two major articles and four commentaries on facilitated communication with people having severe disabilities. Ten basic facilitated communication questions which these papers address are listed. (DB)

This response to Green and Shane (EC 609 759) and Biklen and Duchan (EC 609 760), which presented opposing views of facilitated communication (FC) with people having severe disabilities, focuses on alternative meanings of the controversy itself. It concludes that the controversy shows the need to resolve the conflict between systematic inquiry and…

This paper examines the role of communication partners in enhancing communication with persons with severe disabilities; discusses communication as a fundamental characteristic of human interactions, which can be nonsymbolic and nonlinguistic and which involve creation of shared meanings; and introduces the papers in this special journal issue.…

A qualitative methodology was used to compare specific experiences and ecological factors that 40 mothers perceived as influencing their expectations for their adolescents (20 with severe disabilities and 20 with no disabilities). Both groups of mothers identified many of the same factors as influencing their expectations. Children's personalities…

This article describes the design and use of daily schedules for individual students, especially those with moderate or severe disabilities, highlighting the multiple learning opportunities such schedules can provide. It considers advantages of schedule use, types of daily schedules, considerations for developing schedules, embedded academic…

Evaluation of a shared-work program found that job coach assistance to three workers with severe multiple disabilities could be reduced by assigning each worker only those job tasks able to be performed with minimal assistance while ensuring that entire tasks were still completed by combining steps performed by all three workers. (Contains…

Evaluation of the home environments of 64 families of children with severe disabilities 7 and 9 years after the initial assessment found a high degree of stability, especially on the Family Environment Scale (FES). However, internal consistency reliability of the FES was lower for these families than in the standardization samples. (Contains…

This paper reviews studies investigating the assessment and treatment of hand mouthing in individuals with severe to profound developmental disabilities. A literature search identified 101 studies carried out between 1969 and 2004. The trend in the studies indicated a shift away from aversive interventions in the last 10 years, so this review…

Four experiments with six students with multiple profound disabilities examined the function of behavioral stereotypies and sensory modalities maintaining them. Findings are discussed in terms of the sensory and social reinforcers that maintain stereotypy, assessment procedures used to identify reinforcers, and the interpretation of assessment…