Described are strategies for teaching social communication skills to 8- to 10-year-old students with mild handicaps. The instructional model involves determining behaviors to be taught; assessing social communication skills; teaching skills through motivating student performance, modeling, and practicing; and maintaining and transferring skills. A…

Describes the three most common (and least effective) techniques for helping campers make friends. A camp counselor's anecdote presents a sure-fire way to make friends: getting people to talk about themselves, and then listening. (TD)

Gifted students with spatial strengths are often overlooked and underserved in American schools. These students have remarkable areas of talent but often have verbal learning difficulties that prevent them from being identified for gifted services. This article focuses on definitions of spatial ability, characteristics of these learners, possible…

Children with autism fail to develop joint attention skills appropriate to developmental age. Joint attention is a predictor of ability in several core domains of autism including language, social development, affective sharing, and theory of mind capacity, thus establishing the significance of teaching joint attention. However, there is limited…

This paper outlines a vision of evaluation and its place in social and educational policy and practice. It focuses on the "presence" of evaluation in theory, organizational learning and internationalization and the "voice" of participants in the evaluation process drawing on a range of examples of evaluation practice. It argues…

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) has emerged as one of the most effective empirically based strategies for instructing individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Four ABA-based strategies that have been found effective are video modeling, visual strategies, social script fading, and task analysis. Individuals with ASD often struggle with…

School-based approaches to addressing aggression in the early grades have focused on explicit curriculum addressing social and emotional processes. The current study reviews research on the distinct modes of aggression, the status of current research on social and emotional processing relevant to problems of aggression amongst young children, as…

This book offers support and practical techniques for teachers who work with children with Asperger Syndrome (AS). Based on the successful experiences of classroom teachers, and written from a teacher's perspective, this book provides creative and easy-to-apply strategies that support and encourage AS students in the mainstream classroom, from…

It has been estimated that over 20 percent of children live in families where one parent has, or has had, a mental illness. Given the role of schools in children's academic as well as psychosocial development, it was considered important to identify effective strategies that school personnel have used in supporting such children. Parents and…

Social behavior skills were taught to 7- and 8-year-old resource room students through controlled simulation of real-life situations in which students were encouraged to think of various solutions to a problem, evaluate them, and apply the best one. (CL)

A review of the research regarding the effectiveness of cooperative learning methods (particularly student teams) indicated that when the classroom is structured in a way that allows students to work cooperatively on learning tasks, students benefit academically as well as socially. The greatest strength of cooperative learning methods is the wide…

The influence of peer models on changing the impulsive response styles of fourth and sixth grades was experimentally investigated. (DP)

This five-part document, based on the position that schools should teach social-emotional development, presents a rationale concerning human needs for healthy social-emotional development, presents a rationale for teaching it, and outlines exploratory and respectful behaviors. Part 1 defines the position which stresses the need to increase…

The purpose of the research was to determine the effects of direct and indirect teaching style on elementary students ranked "high" and "low" in social-emotional development. Twenty teachers who demonstrated direct and indirect teaching styles were identified; 94 elementary students were ranked high and low, based on five measures of…