Notes that psychologists providing services to children and adolescents with severe disabilities face numerous challenges requiring expanded approach to evaluation, consultation, and intervention. Describes three-year federally supported inservice training project in detail. Discusses best training practices which emphasize interdisciplinary…

This case study describes the educational history and current program of Mike, a mainstreamed sixth-grader with deaf-blindness. It addresses the boy's successes and the ongoing challenges faced by his family, his educational team, and his peers. Background information notes his diagnosis of total blindness and moderate to severe hearing loss, his…

This final report describes the activities and accomplishments of a 3-year project in New York City on the formation and maintenance of social relationships and social networks of children and adolescents with deaf-blindness. Research activities attempted to: (1) identify patterns of social interaction and social networks across educational…

This resource manual provides information on adaptive technology for students with deaf-blindness and severe disabilities. The material is based on a project that sought to identify specific applications that support the acquisition of early communication and social interaction skills. The first section describes 20 computer software programs and…

This project developed and evaluated an intervention program involving applications of technology to enhance the communication skills and behaviors of children with deaf blindness and other severe disabilities. Of interest were specific applications designed to increase attention, use of symbols, reception, expression of choice, awareness of…

This final report describes the activities and outcomes of a project designed to develop and establish a psychoeducational assessment model to enhance the ability of educators, psychologists, and learning specialists to design and conduct meaningful evaluations of students who are deaf-blind. By focusing on psychoeducational assessment, this…

This manual presents an assessment instrument designed to help teachers, educational specialists, speech-language therapists, psychologists, and other service providers evaluate the communication skills of children, adolescents, and young adults who have multiple disabilities, including severe or profound mental retardation and deafblindness. It…

This case study describes the inclusive education program of a student (age 12) with deaf-blindness. Critical factors associated with the program's success included direct administrative involvement, teachers' and peers' problem-solving skills, adaptations of materials and activities and the environment, effective teaming, and positive attitudes…

This study examined communication behaviors of 103 children and adolescents with severe cognitive disabilities using natural observations and structured one-to-one interactions. Analysis identified seven communication profiles ranging from basic reactions to complex interactions. Differences due to severity of disability but not age were observed.…

The availability of semantic information in storage and the accessibility of that information for retrieval was studied with 40 retarded and 40 nonretarded adolescents. In Experiment I, Ss were required to retrieve information from semantic categories, as well as judge whether specific items were members of a given category. Results showed that…

Two experiments were concerned with exploring the relative accessibility and availability of category information in retarded adolescents in comparison with CA equivalent nonretarded subjects. (Author/SB)

Investigated were the abilities of 98 educable mentally retarded adolescents to encode and retrieve words using semantic and acoustic cues in a free and cued recall task. Available from: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 355 Chestnut Street, Norwood, New Jersey 07648. (CL)

Mildly mentally retarded adolescents (N=14) and mental age-matched nonretarded children participated in three experiments examining language processing efficiency. Results suggested that the retarded and nonretarded differ in the speed with which the semantic-analytic processes are executed but not necessarily the phonological encoding processes…