The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of task-based writing instruction, a communicative language-teaching method, on second language acquisition and differentiation of instruction for English language learners during the independent work time instructional component of the Open Court Reading program. Through student-teacher…

The effects of the decreasing assistance and the increasing assistance approaches to fluency building rates of six severely/profoundly handicapped students (12 to 16 years old) were examined. Using a two-choice discrimination task, it was found that, during fluency building, the increasing assistance approach appeared to be more efficient. (Author)

Background: Research on social skills in physical education has shown that students' fair play behaviors remain underdeveloped unless teachers include social skills instruction into the curriculum. Fair play behaviors are learned behaviors that are specific to the context of physical education and sport, and may generalize to other settings. One…

Many everyday matching tasks taught to persons with developmental disabilities are visual-visual non-identity matching (VVNM) tasks, such as matching the printed word DOG to a picture of a dog, or matching a sock to a shoe. Research has shown that, for participants who have failed a VVNM prototype task, it is very difficult to teach them various…

A four-step sequential prompt instruction strategy for mildly handicapped students is outlined and suggestions are made for managing prompts during instruction and monitoring their use. (CL)

In this paper, we present a synchronous text-based communication tool, referred to as Adaptive Communication Tool (ACT), which provides capabilities for adaptation and personalization. ACT supports both the free and the structured form of dialogue. The structured dialogue is implemented by two types of Scaffolding Sentence Templates (SST); i.e.…

Student teachers learned about teaching principles with the help of an instructional program that included classroom animation exemplars, where expert teachers demonstrate how to apply teaching principles to a classroom scenario. Some students learned by solely observing the classroom animations, whereas others were presented with the expert's…

We evaluated a video prompting and fading procedure for teaching three adults with developmental disabilities to wash dishes. Video prompting involved showing video clips depicting each step of the task. All three adults reached 90-100% correct when video prompting was implemented. Following acquisition, video prompting was withdrawn, but…

This paper describes the effects of learning support on simulation-based learning in three learning models: experiment prompting, a hypothesis menu, and step guidance. A simulation learning system was implemented based on these three models, and the differences between simulation-based learning and traditional laboratory learning were explored in…

Comparison of two response prompting procedures--progressive time delay and system of least prompts--to teach three severely handicapped students (ages 8-16) identification of functional objects indicated that both procedures were effective but that the time delay procedure required fewer sessions, trials, errors to criterion, and minutes of…

Results showed that the graduated prompting procedure was effective in training reach-grasp responding in all three children; for one child, effects were durable over repeated treatment applications, but not maintained during withdrawals; for another child, the procedure was effective in teaching reach-grasp responding in all three positions.…

A prompt sequence beginning with a verbal prompt and physical assistance resulted in a significantly higher rate of self-initiated responses by 12 moderately/mildly retarded adults than two other sequences (giving verbal prompts while providing lessening amounts of physical assistance and giving lessening amounts of physical assistance. (Author/CL)

The Reading, Engaging, and Learning project (REAL) investigated whether a classroom intervention that enhanced young children's experience with informational books would increase reading achievement and engagement. Participants attended schools serving low income neighborhoods with 86% African American enrollment. The longitudinal study spanned…

Drawing on the theory of documents representation (Perfetti et al., Toward a theory of documents representation. In: H. v. Oostendorp & S. R. Goldman (Eds.), "The construction of mental representations during reading." Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), we argue that successfully dealing with multiple documents on the World Wide Web requires readers to…