The article maintains that many behavior modification specialists now prefer the labels "applied behavior analysis" and summarizes four studies published in the "Journal of Precision Teaching" on learning by activity, encouragement of creative writing, inner thought, and impact on the field. (Author/MC)

The author reports on recent Soviet studies of developmentaly delayed (DD) children, which compare clinical characteristics of DD, mentally retarded, and normal children relative to such aspects as attention, memory, intellectual functioning, and verbal facility. Noted is the similarity of DD children to American learning disabled children.…

This article illustrates the use of generalizability theory in special education to estimate the reliability of a measure when there is more than one source of error in the universe of inference and how the effects from changing the number of items and/or raters can be evaluated. (Author)

A study of articles appearing in the "Journal of Learning Disabilities," from 1971 through 1980, yielded results such as 87 percent of definitions of dyslexia were in terms of a selective reading or spelling deficiency on a standardized test and only one of 45 studies classified dyslexics. (Author/MC)

The review of the first 10 years of The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, which began in 1971, describes the program's origins in the identification and educational facilitation of specific students by individual staff members. Also described and evaluated are the fast paced precalculus, college level calculus, other mathematics classes,…

Seven autistic and other severely dysfunctional five- to seven-year-old boys were each given a soft, hard, and wheeled toy in random sequence. The soft toy evoked more inappropriate play behaviors and high levels of self-stimulation across subjects than either the hard or the wheeled toys. (Author/MC)

Three hypotheses adduced from social comparison theory were tested by assessing the self-concepts of 138 normal children, 138 mildly handicapped children in three special education settings (from partial to total segregation), and 46 children with academic difficulties in regular classes. (Author/MC)

Forty-two deaf children, eight- to 12-years-old and randomly divided into two groups, viewed the television program "Shazam" without captions (Group 1) and with captions at a simple language level (Group 2). Results indicated that captions enhance perception of emotional complexity by deaf children. (Author/MC)

A refined and extended analysis of variance (ANOVA) approach was used to investigate the pattern of relationships among arithmetic ability; reading ability; and general ability as assessed by teacher ratings and standardized tests, over a three-year period, with 54 educable mentally retarded children, initially 12 years old. (Author)

The reliability and stability of the Full Scale IQ scores of retarded adolescents and young adults of three Wechsler Scales were measured. (Author)

To assess the relative effectiveness of computerized over conventional remedial methods with handicapped learners, 205 learning disabled elementary school children were assigned to a mathematics computer assisted instructional (CAI) or spelling CAI treatment or a conventional instruction control group. Results indicated that gains for the three…

An adaptation of Egon Brunswik's lens-model methodology was used for evaluation of consumer judgments concerning overall effectiveness of a special education inservice training program for rural area handicapped preschool children and their families. (Author)

Recent litigation in Pennsylvania (Battle vs. Commonwealth, 1980) has established that handicapped children cannot be arbitrarily denied free public education beyond the normal 180-day school year. This decision is contrasted with present policies and practices governing extended school year services. (Author)

Forty-three language intervention studies published during the 1970s were critically analyzed. Findings indicated that, in general, studies have not paralleled current psycholinguistic thinking. Only 34.8% of the studies were successful in increasing the communicative competence of their severely handicapped subjects. (Author/CL)

Six studies are reviewed which indicate that direct instruction tends to produce higher academic gains for handicapped children than traditional approaches. They also suggest that some subtle principles of direct instruction--such as insistence on complete (rather than partial) mastery of each step in the learning process--are important.…