Educators often presume that all children prenatally exposed to crack or cocaine will be out of control in classrooms and doomed to failure. This article debunks five popular myths concerning such children. Educators should forgo the notion that these children exhibit similar behaviors. They should consider the variables affecting behavior and…

Examines solutions to problems involved in the learning and teaching of biological inheritance and the evolution of living beings at the secondary school level. Shows that the program instilled knowledge close to what is adequate for this educational level. Proposes disciplinary criteria for selecting and sequencing the content to be taught and…

Examines the reading and mathematics growth of 180 children over four points, spanning 2nd and 3rd grades. Results reveal that the mathematics difficulty-only (MD) group grew at a faster rate in mathematics than did the mathematics difficulty-reading difficulty (MD-RD) group. In reading, the reading difficulty-only and MD-RD groups grew at about…

Discusses identification and support needs of people with intellectual disabilities, noting compelling reasons to continue theoretical and empirically validated efforts to develop more reliable, valid methods of identifying such people and reviewing the historical evolution of the concept of mental retardation and its measurement.(SM)

Reviews four professional resources about dyslexia and learning disabilities that differ in perspective but have many commonalities in their advice to teachers. (MG)

Suggestions are made for overcoming these common learning problems: (1) can't stick to a task; (2) trouble organizing time and space when starting or finishing a task; (3) trouble dealing with verbal information; (4) visual and visual-motor difficulties; (5) trouble understanding spoken language; and (6) trouble memorizing. (JD)

Claims that authors of a November 1988 "Kappan" article on special education are conducting a campaign to change special education in their own image. Asserts that special and regular education are interwoven, not separate or segregated, processes and that support teams are designed to help teachers improve student learning and behavior in the…

Provides background for school psychologists to use in consulting with teachers about learning problems in science. Two approaches that have dominated current practices for the past few decades do not align well with research-based design features of quality science curricula diverse learners need. Describes four important research-based…

This study attempted to predict spelling errors of 222 children (grades 4-6) from their performance on pseudohomophone choice and rhyme matching tasks. Analysis showed that both accurate and rapid choice of pseudohomophones sounding like real words and rhyme matching contributed substantially to variations in spelling. (Contains extensive…

This introductory article briefly describes each of the following eight articles in this special issue on the neurology and genetics of learning related disorders. It notes the greater appreciation of learning disability as a set of complex disorders with broad and intricate neurological bases and of the large individual differences in how these…

nstraints, phonotactic probabilityThe effects of phonotactic constraints (i.e., the status of a sound as correctly or incorrectly articulated) and phonotactic probability (i.e., the likelihood of a sound sequence) on lexical acquisition have been investigated independently. This study investigated the interactive influence of phonotactic…

This study investigated the extent to which teaching the recommended methods for problem-solving presented in third-grade mathematics textbooks adhered to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards and instructional design criteria. Results indicated that there were more variations than similarities within and across textbooks in…

This study explored the arithmetic skills of 39 children with arithmetic learning difficulties (ALD), compared to two control groups, one consisting of normally achieving children matched to the ALD sample for chronological age (n =28), and another comprising younger normally achieving children matched to the ALD sample for arithmetic level (n…

This meta-analysis of 62 studies (N=17,767 adopted children) examined whether the cognitive development of adopted children differed from that of (a) children who remained in institutional care or in the birth family and (b) their current (environmental) nonadopted siblings or peers. Adopted children scored higher on IQ tests than their nonadopted…

A word-learning task was used to investigate variation among developmental dyslexics classified as phonological and surface dyslexics. Dyslexic children and chronological age (CA)- and reading level (RL)-matched normal readers were taught to pronounce novel nonsense words such as "veep." Words were assigned either a regular (e.g., ''veep'') or an…