Describes school-based Intervention Assistant Teams' (IATs) work with rural nonspecial education students experiencing regular-classroom difficulties. Teams evaluate students, recommend, and carry out intervention. Discusses team leadership, membership, and principals' and parents' roles. Describes potential IAT benefits for students, parents, and…

Reviews the renewed alliance between music educators and medical researchers in researching the learning process. Focuses on how music is used as therapy for disabled children and the research that enables teachers to provide effective instruction to special education students. Emphasizes the interdisciplinary courses that relate music and…

Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), the leading cause of mental retardation, often goes unrecognized because of social and emotional taboos about alcohol and alcoholism. This article describes medical and behavioral characteristics of FAS children and describes guiding principles for educators, based on early intervention, teaching communication and…

Suggests that music education by its nature is well suited to meeting the special needs of at-risk students. Discusses the role of music in motivating and enabling students to succeed. Defines the causes of failure as inability and lack of desire to learn when at-risk students receive the wrong kind of instruction. (DK)

Clinical research has established a connection between childhood trauma and the development of dissociative disorders in adults. Pathological dissociation produces a range of symptoms and behaviors such as amnesias, rapid shifts in mood and behavior, and auditory and visual hallucinations. Many of these symptoms are misdiagnosed as attention,…

Found that (1) children perceived that school failure attributed to lack of competence, task difficulty, and a bad explanation by the teacher is controllable; and (2) children with problems in learning and concentration perceived failure attributed to lack of effort as noncontrollable more often than did children without such problems. (BB)

The study examined use of a curriculum-based measurement computer program to first, evaluate phonetic patterns in four spelling curricula and second, help special education teachers (N=27) identify students' phonetic spelling errors. Results indicated similarities among curricula and effectiveness of the ongoing feedback on teachers' skills. (DB)

Investigates the effect of a school-based early mental health intervention program on school adjustment, using a wait-control design, for elementary grade students. The intervention was found to significantly lessen teachers' perception of student shyness, anxiety, and learning problems. It also increased perceived assertive social skills, task…

Discusses problems of learning English by students from Papua New Guinea, suggesting teachers restructure accepted assumptions about teaching and learning in English to more appropriately meet needs of students from different cultures. Argues many of these language problems are associated with lack of equivalence between concepts of academic…

Using a review of survey responses from developmental reading students at a residential two-year college, this article reports that great emphasis should be placed on student/faculty interactions and positive peer group interactions in the college experience. Suggests that faculty members participate in academic advising, offer study skills…

Discusses how study teams at one Texas elementary school function in helping the individual student, and provides an evaluation of this approach based on three examples: (1) the case study team; (2) the reading study team; and (3) the quality of life team. Lessons learned from this approach are explored. (GR)

Results from 291 first-year Australian college students with learning and writing difficulties (language minorities or students from other countries) suggest a direct effect of those difficulties on performance in first-year biology. College language and learning services that address areas in which students recognize their difficulties may…

Although most constructivist classrooms feature active, social, and creative learning, different kinds of knowledge (inert, ritual, conceptually difficult, and foreign) invite varied constructivist responses, not one standard approach. Constructivism is pragmatic and should be viewed as a toolbox for problems of learning; teachers should use…

This article discusses the evolution of teaching approaches in concert with the findings of over three decades of researches on student perceptual strengths. Confusing reports of successes and only limited successes for students with varied perceptual strengths suggest that combined auditory, visual, tactual, and/or kinesthetic instructional…

The Cognitive Profiling System (CoPS 1) is a psychometric assessment/screening system presented in the form of computer games to children in their early school years in order to predict the probability of later learning difficulties of both a general and specific nature (Singleton, Horne, & Thomas, 1999). Although some evidence is available as…