The Journal of Special Education

Hyperactivity is one of the most common reasons for chronic drug therapy in exceptional children. Clinicians have long recognized that behavioral evaluations from the teacher are essential in diagnosing this disorder, titrating dosage, and monitoring and terminating treatment. In order to evaluate the adequacy of typical treatment practices, 2 state-wide studies of special education programs were conducted. Teachers completed questionnaires for 232 pupils in their current classroom who were receiving medication for a learning or behavior disorder, and the mothers of 100 of these children participated in a telephone interview. The findings from both studies were remarkably similar. Teachers were often not involved in referral, diagnosis, or the withdrawal of medication. The allegation that school personnel frequently pressure parents into medication for their child was unsupported. Although 60% of the teachers reported drug effects, standardized evaluation instruments were rarely used. Direct communication with the physician was all but nonexistent. There appears to be a considerable disparity between the treatment procedures recommended in the medical literature as being necessary for adequate care and typical practices in everyday situations.

The author outlines the implications of a linguistic-functions approach for special topics in language intervention. The five topics considered are (a) language assessment and programming for non-verbal children with some receptive (and some expressive) language, (b) language programming for low-level profoundly retarded children, (c) population differences in the acquisition of linguistic functions, (d) the integration of language into other activities, and (e) the entrainment by linguistic functions of so-called prerequisites to language.

This review compares two approaches to parent-infant intervention in developmental disabilities. The first, a parent training approach, instructs parents to carry out therapeutic and/or curriculum-based procedures under the supervision of an intervention specialist. The second, a relationship-focused approach, attempts to foster adaptive parent-infant and parent-professional relationships and to promote generalized parent competence. Several sources of program validation are consulted to support the promise of relationship-focused early intervention in families of developmentally disabled infants. The review describes the characteristics and preliminary findings of a relationship-focused intervention program for high-risk or developmentally disabled infants under the authors' direction.

The bivariate normal distribution can be used to determine the prevalence of reading disabilities when the primary variables are reading achievement and IQ and when the correlation between reading and IQ is known or can be estimated. In the case where the reading achievement z score cutoff is <– 1.0 (z scores less than– 1.0) and the IQz score cutoff is > -.7 (z scores greater than -.7), and the correlation between reading and IQ is .65, the proportion of reading-disability cases is .0576. This is in contrast to using only a reading z score cutoff of < −1.0, which would result in a proportion of .1587 based on the normal distribution. Using IQ to limit classification as reading disabled will decrease the proportion of reading-disability cases, depending on the z score cutoff points and the correlation between reading and IQ. As the correlation between reading and IQ increases, for any two cutoff points, the proportion of reading-disability cases decreases. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using the bivariate normal distribution to estimate the prevalence of reading disabilities.

This paper describes an intervention designed to enhance spelling achievement for learning-disabled (LD) elementary school children. A total of 39 LD children were instructed for 8 sessions over a period of 3 weeks. An experimental group (n = 24) was taught with lessons that incorporated reduced unit size, distributed practice and review, and training for transfer, and a comparison group (n = 15) with methods that are typically used in the teaching of spelling. While all children could spell less than 10% of the words on the pretest, the experimental group achieved 80% accuracy on spelling words taught and 75% accuracy on transfer words on a delayed posttest. This was higher than the average posttest performance of the comparison group (60% accuracy on training items and 50% accuracy on transfer items). These findings suggest that LD children can improve their spelling skills if sound remedial principles are applied consistently. The instructional sequence described in this paper can serve both as a model of effective spelling instruction and as a diagnostic, trial-remediation technique for a disabled population.

The purpose of the investigation was to study Academic Learning Time (ALT) of mainstreamed handicapped and nonhandicapped students. ALT was obtained on 60 nonhandicapped and 60 mainstreamed handicapped students in elementary school physical education classes. Subjects were selected from the classes of 7 teachers classified as individualized instruction users and 7 teachers classified as nonusers. A 2 × 2 analysis of variance was used in the data analysis. Results indicated that the students in the classes of users of individualized instruction were engaged in a significantly greater amount of ALT than were students of nonusers. There was no significant difference in the amount of ALT engaged in by mainstreamed handicapped and regular students.

Although animal characters play an important role in children's literature, little research has assessed how children relate to these characters. The present study, by measuring same-sex associations, examined whether deaf and hearing students could personally identify with neutrally presented animal characters and whether the patterns would be similar or different for female and male students. The results indicated that hearing students made more masculine associations than did hearing-impaired students and that males had more masculine scores than did females. Differential incorporation of cultural and language bias, use of self-referents, and educational implications are discussed.

Although emotional disturbance among children has been acknowledged for over 200 years, services for such children have lagged behind those provided other handicapped groups. This is true even in comparison with recently “discovered” handicaps such as learning disabilities. The author explains this phenomenon in terms of the ambiguity and variety of definitions of emotional disturbance. The underlying reasons for muddled definitions, and their resultant befuddled diagnostic processes, are discussed in terms of 4 factors: (a) the impact of theory, (b) societal diversity, (c) benchmarks for decision making, and (d) instrumentation. It is argued that until we attempt to form operational definitions of the major types of emotional disturbance, we have no choice but to continue to descant about conceptual models that cannot be empirically evaluated. The paper then presents a method for diagnosis that is practicable, functional, and verifiable. It involves the collection of data from the environment via screening devices and from the child via systematic observation schedules. Problems involved in the implementation of the diagnostic process are discussed.

Teacher selection of gifted children is a frequently used but inadequately evaluated identification method, often appreciated for its apparent relevance to children's educational functioning but criticized for its ineffectiveness in identifying the gifted. As an attempt to improve teachers' identification of giftedness, more objective and empirical instruments such as the Scale for Rating Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Children (SRBCSS) (Renzulli, Hartman, & Callahan, 1971) have been developed. The purpose of this investigation was to explore the factor-analytic structure of the SRBCSS to determine whether the factors found are similar to the behavioral dimensions (i.e., Learning, Motivation, Creativity, and Leadership) that the SRBCSS purports to assess. The results suggest that there are 5 dimensions being assessed by the SRBCSS. The significance of these results, descriptions of each factor, and recommended research are discussed.

Important issues pertaining to educating the preservice undergraduate special educator are discussed by critically analyzing so-called scholarly literature from a nontraditional, multidisciplinary perspective. Diagnostic-prescriptive teaching methodologies are found to be inadequate once again, and suggestions are provided to expand the field's consciousness level by using new and different information sources that are currently neglected by practicing professionals. A practicum-evaluation form is proffered as a sacrificial lamb to the reality of present day mainline/mainstream special education literature.