Stresses the need for understanding the barriers to effective library use resulting from the diversity of users and the overwhelming amount of information available. Guidelines are suggested for use by academic librarians in evaluating facilities, services, and staff to assess their effectiveness in welcoming users and validating their information…

This study, involving 20 normally developing 4-year olds, found no visual sequential recall differences between direct selection and scanning in task performance. However, subjects correctly recalled fewer sequential symbols represented by Blissymbols than by Picsyms, and recalled significantly fewer three-symbol sequences than two-symbol…

Interviews with 10 linguistically diverse elementary students revealed that they felt lonely because they could not communicate with their peers. Loss of self-esteem and development of learned helplessness syndrome were directly related to length of time they experienced loneliness. Teacher's nonverbal communication and social interactions that do…

Daniel is autistic. He is charming, intelligent, creative, and full of energy, just like his 18 classmates. However, he is unable to use language to interact with others. His rare attempts at communication are through imitation and usually in only one or two words. Teachers and aides communicate with Daniel using a combination of picture symbols…

This article discusses how teachers and parents can help build children's communication skills. Children's language develops in predictable stages. Here, the author outlines these stages. She also gives suggestions to parents on how to help build their communication skills at home. Language learning takes place throughout the classroom. The author…

Discrete trial training (DTT) is a well-established intervention for teaching skills to children with autism; however, few published guidelines are available for determining whether a child's rate of learning a particular skill is satisfactory and, if not, what to do. We assert that progress within 8-10 teaching sessions usually is evidence of…

The introduction of computer and communications technology, and particularly the internet, into education has opened up some new possibilities for teaching and learning. Courses designed and delivered in an online environment offer the possibility of highly interactive and individually focussed teaching and learning experiences. However, online…

This ESRC-funded study explores how 3-year-old children use a range of "voices" during their first year in pre-school, investigating how they make and express meaning "multimodally" through combinations of talk, body movement, facial expression and gaze in the two different settings of home and playgroup. Using longitudinal…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to address the lack of quantitative data on eye-to-face gaze (also known as eye contact) in the literature on pragmatic communication. The study focused on adolescents and young adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), as gaze often is included in social skills intervention in this population. Method: Gaze…

Touch matters. Humans need nurturing touch for optimum emotional, physical, and cognitive development and health--especially in infancy. Positive touch lowers levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain. Drawing on research and anecdotal evidence to support the importance of touch to children's well-being, the author makes a case for…

The purpose of this study was to describe how one primary teacher of poor and working class rural students promoted small-group dialogue about books and literary concepts. Specifically, we focused on how she guided the students from the beginning of a lesson in ways that later led to dialogue during a videotaped four-day lesson sequence. We…

Aims: To compare siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) and siblings of children with typical development (SIBS-TD) at 4 and 14 months of age. Methods: At 4 months, mother-infant interactional synchrony during free play, infant gaze and affect during the still-face paradigm, and infant responsiveness to a name-calling paradigm were examined (n…

This instructional text is intended as an alternate motivational guide to teaching English composition. It consists of the use of the question-and-answer, open discussion approach--resembling to some extent, the Socratic method. None of the program's units contain techniques for teaching the grammatical aspects of writing, but every unit…

The Women in the Workplace Vocational Education Project, an 8-hour workshop, was presented in fall 1986 to 15 women between 17 and 25 years of age who were enrolled at either Elizabethtown (Kentucky) Community College or Vocational School and who were at or below the poverty level. A spring 1987 workshop, "Sex Bias in the Workplace,"…

There is a great reliance on symbolic messages in our society, but the success of these messages depends on how they are interpreted. The variability of subjects' interpretations of commonly used visual symbols was investigated by comparing the interpretations of a U.S. audience and a Jamaican audience. Responses of 27 executive master's in…