No abstract

The sociometric standing of primary-aged learning disabled students was investigated. The setting was a sparsely populated rural area where learning disabled children were mainstrearned in an elementary school in which an "open concept" delivery of services system was in operation. The "special child" stigma was therefore assumed to be significantly reduced. The data support the findings of previous studies on handicapped and normal children; i.e..significant differences were found between the learning disabled and normal control groups on both the positive and negative questions. Further analysis revealed that the learning disabled girls were less likely to be positively chosen and more likely to be rejected than the learning disabled boys. A discussion of possible reasons for such differences is included.

The study examined gender differences in attributions for success and failure in math/science and language arts. Developmental patterns were also examined through a cross sectional design of 731 boys and 680 girls in grades four through eleven. Girls were found to have fewer adaptive attributional patterns in math/science than in language arts. While boys had more adaptive patterns in math/science than had girls, they also had more adaptive patterns for language arts patterns than for math/science. It was concluded that cross content area research should consider the student's relative perceived task difficulty.