Research has shown general case programming to be an effective method for teaching a wide range of skills to students with disabilities. The authors used a multiple probe nested in an ABA reversal design to test (a) the effectiveness of general case programming for teaching 4 students with mild to moderate disabilities to take and give telephone…

The present research explores young children's extension of novel labels to novel animate items. Three experiments were performed by means of the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. In Experiment 1, after repeated exposure to novel word-object associations, 24- and 36-month-olds extend novel labels on the basis of shape similarity, in…

Few studies have focused on improving staff performance in naturalistic training settings for high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Behavioral skills training, consisting of group instruction and supervisory feedback, was used to improve staff performance on (a) providing positive reinforcement, (b) providing error…

I articulate Charles S. Peirce's philosophy of mathematical education as related to his conception of mathematics, the nature of its method of inquiry, and especially, the reasoning abilities required for mathematical inquiry. The main thesis is that Peirce's philosophy of mathematical education primarily aims at fostering the development of the…

A systematic review of the literature regarding treatment of pediatric feeding disorders was conducted. Articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals (1970-2010) evaluating treatment of severe food refusal or selectivity were identified. Studies demonstrating strict experimental control were selected and analyzed. Forty-eight single-case research…

This study evaluated "The Transporters", an animated series designed to enhance emotion comprehension in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). n = 20 children with ASC (aged 4-7) watched "The Transporters" everyday for 4 weeks. Participants were tested before and after intervention on emotional vocabulary and emotion recognition at three…

Humans reason by analogy (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gentner, 1983; 2003; Hofstadter, 2001, 2006; Pinker, 2007). Some have further argued that analogs can be scientific models (Hesse, 1966, Clement, 1989) although clearly not all analogies are models. Analogies based on mere physical similarity are not equivalent to scientific models but analogies…

How do people learn novel mathematical information that contradicts prior knowledge? The focus of this thesis is the role of structure in the acquisition of knowledge about hyperbolic geometry, a non-Euclidean geometry. In a series of three experiments, I contrast a more holistic structure--training based on closed figures--with a mathematically…

According to the composite-stimulus control model (Weiss, 1969, 1972b), an individual discriminative stimulus (S[superscript D]) is composed of that S[superscript D]'s on-state plus the off-states of all other relevant S[superscript D]s. The present experiment investigated the reversibility of composite-stimulus control. Separate groups of rats…

Two experiments investigated the ability of adults with a history of language-based learning disability (hLLD) and their normal language (NL) peers to learn prosodic patterns of a novel language. Participants were exposed to stimuli from an artificial language and tested on items that required generalization of the stress patterns and the…

Three new direct-service staff participated in a program that used a video model to train target skills needed to conduct a discrete-trial session. Percentage accuracy in completing a discrete-trial teaching session was evaluated using a multiple baseline design across participants. During baseline, performances ranged from a mean of 12% to 63%…

This study assessed transfer from a customized executive training program involving 89 public sector employees. Participants who set a distal goal had higher self-efficacy than those in both the "do your best" (DYB) and the proximal plus distal goal conditions. Participants who set proximal plus distal goals had higher maintenance than…

This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3;5 to 8;5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic…

Self-modeling can take different forms but is described as a process where one observes one's own successful behavior and learns from it without dependence on any particular medium. In this study, two separate experiments were conducted to evaluate a video self-modeling (VSM) feedforward intervention. VSM feedforward (independent variable, IV),…

Being schooled with other high-achieving peers has a detrimental influence on students' self-perceptions: School-average and class-average achievement have a negative effect on academic self-concept and career aspirations--the big-fish-little-pond effect. Individual achievement, on the other hand, predicts academic self-concept and career…