The Communication Record: Sharing Information to Promote Sign Language Generalization

Communication-handicapped students who have been taught sign language lose communicative competence when transferring to new classrooms. Their decreased performance results, in part, from a problem in record keeping and information sharing. New teachers do not know which sign language system the transfer student has learned, nor do they possess sufficient details concerning the student's actual communicative performance. The Communication Record is presented as a system for gathering and sharing critical information concerning a student's sign language performance. It is suggested that development of similar systems to foster skill generalization across a variety of instructional domains would be invaluable to handicapped students (and their teachers) as they transfer to new classrooms.