This article examines the concept of mild mental retardation and the confusion surrounding its etiology, prevalence, diagnosis, and educational "treatment." It concludes that mild mental retardation should be redefined in contextual terms: a person's relative difficulty in responding to the environment's cognitive demands. It recommends that the…

Describes classifications of county type by level of urbanization, basic industries, low-income status, and retirement population. Classification by level of urbanization reflects the economic and social opportunities available to county residents. Maps show the location of various types of counties for 1979 or 1980. (KS)

The framework of a study of organizational effectiveness in Australian higher education institutions was applied to a similar study in the United Kingdom. The approach was found useful for classifying U.K. institutions as classical universities, former polytechnics and colleges of advanced technology, and greenfield universities. (Author/MSE)

Whether performance patterns on four variables from the California Verbal Learning Test could differentiate patients with moderate or severe brain injuries from those with mild injuries giving incomplete effort was studied with 46 patients, half of whom were in litigation. The test appeared to be useful as part of an evaluation of brain injury.…

Discusses indexing and access to digital resources, especially on the Internet. Topics include subject searching versus indexing; multiple terms of access; folk classification; basic level terms; folk access; Bradford's Law; Zipfian distributions; vocabulary scalability; the Resnikoff-Dolby 30:1 Rule; domain-specific indexing; and implications for…

Describes activities resulting from a 1997 Minnesota state mandate which called for the development of a statewide virtual university. Measures the results to date against two classification systems and several sets of readiness criteria for virtual universities. Offers recommendations for advancing virtual university partnerships. (Author/DB)

Discusses the decline in the number of female computer science graduates and presents a categorization by educational stages of the research into this decline as well as an evaluation of the generalizability of findings to broader contexts. Show that the most extensive research is done at the post-secondary stage. (Contains 53 references.)…

This article describes the misdiagnosis of some gifted children as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorders because of their disruptive behavior in classrooms. Behaviors associated with gifted children and behaviors associated with children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are discussed, along with characteristics of gifted…

The purpose of this research is to simulate the manual process of assigning descriptors to magazine articles by machine, to investigate how successful automated assignment of descriptors to a heterogeneous text collection is when a text classifier is trained based upon a small set of manually classified example texts, and to test performance of…

Presents suggestions for encouraging practice in the science process skill of classification in early childhood setting learning centers. Includes activities for centers in the areas of home, art, wet and dry, science, language arts, and mathematics. (KB)

Examined the role of the psychological process of comparison in young children's ability to extend a novel adjective to other objects sharing a salient property whether objects are of the same or different basic-level categories. Found that comparison operates in conjunction with naming to support extension of novel adjectives to properties of…

Studied the use of adaptive testing when examinees are classified into three categories. Established testing algorithms with two different statistical computation procedures and evaluated them through simulation using an operative item bank from Dutch basic adult education. Results suggest a reduction of at least 22% in the mean number of items…

Argues that both language-contact factors and typological evolution can effect changes in languages and language typology over time, and that it is not always easy to understand which factor has played a more prominent role in language change. Typological, areal, and socio-historical linguistics call for interdisciplinary cooperation. Examples are…

A discussion of areal linguistics and Amazonian languages looks at common properties of Amazonian languages, the occurrence, origins, and development of evidentiality systems in a number of those languages, and patterns of grammatical diffusion. Concludes that communities in the Amazonian linguistics area share common beliefs, mental attitudes,…

A study took features identified by specialists as typical for the Balkan and Meso-American linguistic areas and counted them for each relevant language. The resulting ranking of languages reflects the extent to which each language exemplifies the areal type, which was then plotted on isopleth maps. Both rankings and maps are useful in…