Intensive academic interventions help address the learning difficulties of students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs). Challenging behaviors exhibited during instruction can have a negative impact on the overall effectiveness of an academic intervention. In addition to academic interventions, students with SLD may benefit from behavioral…

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 encourages schools to use interventions to ensure that students' literacy difficulties are not instructional problems before assuming a learning disability. The law frames these interventions in two ways: as a strategy for identifying students with learning disabilities--a measurement…

Reflects on some of the problems encountered in the authors' experimental approach to a study of reading comprehension. Discusses the limitations of experimental research, and presents an alternative to experimental or quantitative research, focusing on the relationship between teachers and learners as they interact in classrooms. (MM)

A study of 22 learning disabled (LD) and normal children (mean age nine years) was undertaken to illustrate the research problems involved in using analysis of covariance to control for differences between LD and normal children on measures of intelligence. (SW)

Describes an experiment documenting the musical sounds made by children with severe and profound and multiple learning disabilities. Production of these sounds is made by synthesizers and an EMS Soundbeam device that registers sounds created by body movement. Discusses the analysis of these sounds and their use in subsequent therapy. (MJP)

Sixty learning disabled children and 60 children in regular classes (both groups' ages six to nine years) were given a tense marker test to elicit future, present, and past tense markers for 50 verbs organized into ten categories based on the operation required to form the past tense. (Author/PHR)

Hair samples from 31 learning disabled and 22 normal children were analyzed. Significant group differences were determined and a discriminant function was computed which separated the groups with 98 percent accuracy. Elevated lead and cadmium content in the learning disabled group is viewed as being of particular importance. (Author/SL)

Recently, federal legislation has been implemented requiring that public school students meet a specified performance level of academic proficiency by the 2013/2014 school year. This reform movement, known as "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), was passed by Congress and incorporates many of President Bush's educational reform proposals…

Examined with 38 right-handed boys who were either dyslexic or normal readers and matched for age and IQ (mean age both groups=10.6, mean IQ normal readers=106, mean IQ dyslexic readers=105) were the weak, strong, and equal lateralization theories of dyslexia. Cerebral lateralization was measured for linguistic material (digits) using the dichotic…

A program under a performance contract in a Westland, Mich., elementary school designed to improve reading and learning abilities was studied. In a highly mobile community of 75 per cent Appalachian background and generally low level of education, 70-80 per cent of the children tested below grade level on standardized tests. The program had two…

Presents an overview of past approaches to language arts, current thinking, and results of a preliminary study suggesting practical routes for implementing the new research findings in the classroom. (CS/Author)

Learning disabilities teachers were given training and materials for a one-week teaching procedure. Overall posttest performance did not differ among the groups; however, children taught using reduced response competition required fewer trials to reach criterion on each word. Results indicated that teachers also benefited from the program. (Author)

The investigation, which involved 55 learning disabled and 54 normal children (mean age seven years), was designed to test the hypothesis that differences between these groups on tests of perceptual functioning are not educationally significant. (Author/SBH)