This study attempted qualitatively and quantitatively to assess sex-related differences on fine motor tasks performed by 132 first-grade students, 56.8% boys and 43.2% girls. The results of two criterion-referenced probes, involving accuracy and rate, were analyzed with the SPSS programs oneway and anova. Both sexes performed equally well on a task involving dotting a circle but boys performed significantly worse on a task involving symbol copying. It was hypothesized that the difference might reflect a difference in information processing of symbols.

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This article presents a procedure found effective for including students with special needs in daily instructional activities within a general classroom. Practices, based on authentic assessment and subsequent individual intervention decisions, resulted in full participation of students with special needs in daily classroom instruction. Individualized instruction by incorporating student choice of materials, feedback from teacher-designed rubrics, and application of student-constructed reading logs offers students with disabilities the opportunity to maintain growth and appropriate development in general education classrooms.

View related articlesA model for developing a professional teacher education core, with an accompanying automated student performance monitoring system, is reported. State process and performance standards, observational performance assessments, and national test content determined program content and outcomes. The position presented is that a baccalaureate training program may provide a sufficient training base, if a program with high content validity is provided and monitored systematically throughout the course of study.

The study was designed to examine the potential of using repeated rate-of-response measures to identify students exhibiting difficulties in arithmetic. Thirty subjects were followed over 2 years. Pearson product-moment correlations were computed to determine the ability of rate-of-response measures to predict achievement in arithmetic. A follow-up evaluation indicated that the predictive accuracy of the rate of response was 97%.

Analysis of Mathematics and Language Arts scores for 11,438 fourth- and 8,972 seventh-grade students in compensatory education programs on the performance assessments for the Iowa Test of Basic Skills indicated the students performed poorly, particularly in mathematics.

The effects of learning on the discrimination of computer-synthesized speech was assessed by presenting 100 computer-produced monosyllabic words to 2 groups of 15 adult subjects. One group's errors were corrected while the other group's errors were uncorrected. A comparison of errors on the first 50 vs the second 50 presentations showed significant improvement for corrected group only. It was concluded that the discrimination of computer-synthesized monosyllables can be improved with correction of errors but is still about 14% poorer than the discrimination of human speech.