Using language appropriately and effectively in social contexts requires pragmatic language competencies (PLCs). Increasingly, deficits in PLCs are linked to child and adolescent disorders, including autism spectrum, externalizing, and internalizing disorders. As the role of PLCs expands in diagnosis and treatment of developmental psychopathology, psychologists and educators will need to appraise and select clinical and research PLC instruments for use in assessments and/or studies. To assist in this appraisal, 24 PLC instruments, containing 1,082 items, are assessed by addressing four questions: (1) Can PLC domains targeted by assessment items be reliably identified?, (2) What are the core PLC domains that emerge across the 24 instruments?, (3) Do PLC questionnaires and tests assess similar PLC domains?, and (4) Do the instruments achieve content, structural, diagnostic, and ecological validity? Results indicate that test and questionnaire items can be reliably categorized into PLC domains, that PLC domains featured in questionnaires and tests significantly differ, and that PLC instruments need empirical confirmation of their dimensional structure, content validity across all developmental age bands, and ecological validity. Progress in building a better evidence base for PLC assessments should be a priority in future research.

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This study investigated the grade retention of students with learning disabilities. Data were collected on 689 students referred and identified as having learning disabilities during the 1987-88 school year in Indiana. Of these students, 58% had been retained before identification. The results of this investigation suggest that retention is being used as a remediation before labeling a student. Implications of this practice and alternatives to grade retention as a method to address the academic needs of students are discussed.

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in section and to line drawings of the more common parasites. There is new material concerning the use of griseofulvin in the treatment of fungus diseases, but few alterations in the description and classification of these diseases.The authors write in a most readable fashion and the layout of the booklet is in well known form with headings for each of the main section of each disease, for example, definition, pathogenesis, pathology, etc.A little more careful proof-reading would have helped the "new" book. On page 182 the words "the efflorescences of the eruption are frequently associated with increased nervous tensions and anxiety" are followed in the very next line by "in a psoriatic subject, efflorescences of the eruption are frequently associated with increased nervous tensions and anxiety."One would like to have seen more frankness in those remarks which apply to aetiology and pathogenesis. Surely the time has come when if the aetiology is unknown we shouTd say so, and particularly is this true when dealing with undergraduate students. Such sentences as "the cause is unknown; a virus has been suggested" (in the section of lichen planus) is decidedly unhelpful.The authors in their preface say "many regard dermatology as a static subject, but this is far from being true . . ," but they themselves could well have given a few more examples of the dynamics of dermatology in this book. The section on the aetiology of alopecia.areata serves as an example. Here we are told that worry, eye strain, septic foci,