The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of the contingency manager (teacher or pupil) on a pupil's academic response rate. The results of two such experiments disclosed that higher academic rates occurred when the pupil arranged the contingency requirements than when the teacher specified them. A third study manipulated only reinforcement magnitude to ascertain whether amount of reinforcement had interacted with pupil-specified contingencies to produce the increase in academic response rate. The latter findings revealed that the contingency manager, not reinforcement magnitude, accounted for this subject's gain in performance.
Student use of pop-up text windows that support or extend information found in a high school social studies text provides a detailed look into the instructional effectiveness of a set of hypermedia study guides. Twenty-five students, 19 male and 6 female, with a mean age of 14.6 years participated in this study. Thirteen were students with learning disabilities and 12 were remedial students. Findings from the study indicate that hypertext (text-only) support provides adequate reinforcement to move remedial students and students with learning disabilities toward continued, unprompted use of a hypermedia study guide, and that short-term and long-term retention of information can be expected from text-only information support. Students who had access to the hypermedia study guides exhibited better information retention than students who did not use the hypermedia study guides.
Previous research concerning the graphic or visual display of information with academically handicapped students has not addressed the instructional conditions that exist in mainstream settings. This article investigates the effectiveness of graphic organizers for three classifications of secondary students enrolled in content area classes: students with learning disabilities, remedial students, and students in regular education. The results of three separate experiments indicated that graphic organizers, whether teacher-directed, student-directed with text references, or student-directed with clues, produced significantly higher performance than self-study for each group of students. Several practical issues involving the use of graphic organizers with heterogeneous groups of secondary students are discussed.
The purpose of this article is to increase awareness of teachers and other school personnel to the difficulties of many foster children. More specifically, we intend to alert them to the problems these youngsters have while they are in school and once they have left. Moreover, we intend to apprise educators of the fact that large numbers of foster children are receiving, or should be receiving, special services.
This study investigated the effects of an adapted science curriculum on the performance of seventh grade youngsters. The adaptation featured vocabulary exercises and framed outlines. There were 202 regular and mildly handicapped students in the study. Two regular teachers and an intern supervised the seven science classrooms where the experiment took place. The investigation ran for 12 weeks, during which time the students were assigned 8 chapters from a Laidlaw physical science text. Throughout the study, modifications were available for some chapters and not for others. Publisherconstructed tests were administered to the students before and after they worked on each chapter; the posttest data from adapted and nonadapted chapters were then compared. Those data generally showed that the scores of handicapped as well as nonhandicapped students were better when the chapters were modified.
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