Teaching experience at The Lab School of Washington has shown that learning-disabled children and adults cope with their lack of self-esteem and feelings of stupidity by developing masks to hide their hurt. These include masks of super-competence, helplessness, invisibility, clowning, injustice collecting, indifference, boredom, outrageousness,…

Collateral teaching offers an alternative to using commercially prepared social skills programs for learning-disabled students, by enabling teachers to instruct social skills that are required of their students as opportunities arise in normal contexts. Strategies for instructing social skills include coaching, modeling, reinforcement, cognitive…

In response to Kenneth Kavale's theoretical objections to the model of severe discrepancy in determining the existence of learning disabilities, this article describes advantages of discrepancy considerations and presents a model that emphasizes the role of the learning disabilities teacher in diagnosing and remediating specific learning…

This critique of H. Lee Swanson's "Toward a Metatheory of Learning Disabilities" comments on Swanson's concept of learning disabilities, cognitive science, and information processing theory. A different research and theory-building agenda is proposed, focusing on society's definition of learning disabilities and instructional issues and…

Reports on a study designed to document that learning-disabled (LD) students make errors in estimating the passage of short time durations, and to determine if LD students were different than nondisabled in time estimation. Non-LD and LD students differed significantly in estimations of 15-second intervals, but not 3-second intervals. (PK)

Discusses (1) strategies that make learning disabled adolescents independent in subject area classrooms, (2) the use of medieval rhetoric to help modern students expand their writing, and (3) students' opinions of sustained silent reading. (NKA)

The article describes Project ASSIST, a five-week post-high school/precollege summer program to help learning disabled students adjust to the university environment at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The program emphasizes six components: affective support, diagnostic evaluation, academic reinforcement and instruction, strategy training,…

Group counseling sessions featuring activities focusing on relaxation training, self-disclosure, nonverbal communication, role playing, positive feedback, individual strengths and weaknesses, and listening skills helped to decrease emotionally-handicapped (N=6) and learning-disabled (N=6) students' acting-out and distracting classroom behaviors.…

Describes how a learning strategies approach can enable learning disabled students in secondary schools to study effectively, using as an example the acquisition of specific information from reading a chapter in a science text. (JC)

Achievement data of elementary learning-disabled students in both an Integrated Classroom Model (ICM) and resource rooms were compared. The ICM was shown to be more cost effective than resource room programs while achieving similar results on reading, math, and language tests for learning-disabled students and on general achievement tests for…

Lists are provided of computer software for use by persons (elementary school through adult) with social learning deficits to increase competence in (1) personal and social awareness and skill; (2) business and career competencies; and (3) leisure time and sports activity, which often fosters human relations and communication skill. (VW)

The school day of a total of 122 learning disabled, emotionally/behaviorally disturbed, educable mentally retarded, and nonhandicapped elementary students was observed. Findings were noted concerning time allocated to instruction in specific content areas, time spent in different school settings, and time allocated to instruction as a function of…

A 90-minute inservice workshop to facilitate early identification of children "at risk" for auditory processing problems was presented to 44 preschool teachers. Results indicated that, with a relatively brief training experience, preschool teachers can be taught to identify and refer such children. (Author/DB)

Research-based recommendations for an effective writing instruction program for exceptional students include, among others, allocate a sufficient amount of instruction time; expose students to a broad range of writing tasks; integrate writing with other academic subjects; develop the processes of planning, sentence generation, and revising; and…

A review of literature on selected relationships among metacognition, quantitative problem-solving, and learning disabilities focuses on three types of problem-solving activities: word problems; knowledge-based problems; and decision and argument problems. Techniques for teaching problem-solving and integrating metacognition principles into…