This report to Congress examines the Social Security Administration's approach to assessing children's impairments through the individualized functional assessment (IFA) process mandated by the Supreme Court in Sullivan v. Zebley. Specifically, the report assesses the IFA's impact on number of Supplemental Security Income recipients, IFA's…

Critical debates about black expressive culture and black cultural productions within television are examined as a means of exploring processes by which questions about the American racial order, and blackness itself, are constructed, reproduced, and challenged. The central thread of the argument is that commercial culture operates as both a site…

Crocker and Major (1989) hypothesized three mechanisms by which members of stigmatized groups may protect self-esteem. The mechanisms are: (1) in-group social comparisons; (2) valuing/devaluing performance selectively; and (3) racial prejudice. A test of Crocker and Major's hypothesized mechanisms was produced with the development of the…

This paper examines the intersection where migration and adult learning converge, exploring how a transnational social context of living relates to adults' formal and informal learning experiences. In-depth life-history interviews were conducted with 29 adults participating in two social networks that link the central coast region of California…

This study explored the processes that lead to relatively lower academic performance among African American students. It has been suggested that African American students perceive that, because of discrimination, education is less useful as a tool for upward mobility for African Americans than it is for members of other ethnic groups. The nature…

This manual is intended to train teachers to use the Project Success Enrichment (PSE) program to teach language arts and visual art to gifted and typical elementary school students. An introduction outlines the PSE goals and provides a history of PSE. The next section discusses diagnostic and identification procedures for use in examining…

This manual provides guidance to Idaho school districts in identifying students with serious emotional disturbances (SED), as defined by federal and state laws and regulations. Sections 1, 2, and 3 of the guide describe SED in the context of various factors, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 of the…

A study examined the differences between 17 children with language disorders and 20 children with normal language development (ages 8-13) in the way they developed shared knowledge with an adult using an interactive communication task. The structure interaction map task involved the child describing a route through a simple schematic map to an…

The focus group approach with black students and students of Chinese origin at York University in Ontario (Canada) was used to examine attitudes of these groups toward the concept of "visible minority." The results of eight focus group sessions conducted with 48 black students indicated that while 90 percent of the students did consider…

In person-fit analysis, the object is to investigate whether an item score pattern is improbable given the item score patterns of the other persons in the group or given what is expected on the basis of a test model. In this study, several existing group-based statistics to detect such improbable score patterns were investigated, along with the…

Recent instances of cultural conflict represent a single, broad, novel cultural tendency with real capacities to effect change. This tendency is labeled "black cultural projection." By altering American culture, black cultural projection questions entrenched patterns of political and economic domination in the United States, even though…

Demystifying some of the implications of multiculturalism might allow the opportunity to ground the field in the basic exercise of cultural affirmation, self-determination. Contributors to this book affirm that self-determination and moving beyond the comfort zones to which multiculturalism has advanced are essential to seeing multiculturalism as…

This practicum addressed the need to provide training and experiences for school psychologists serving preschool children and their families. The practicum involved preparing and presenting inservice training to special education cooperative preschool assessment teams. Inservice training sessions covered: multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and…

This study was conducted to identify characteristics of the most academically successful graduates of a teacher education program at the University of Alberta (Canada). Graphical data provide information about all of the graduates; tabular displays provide more specific information about those who graduated with distinction. For example, students…

This learning packet, one in a group of eight, was developed by the Duke Power State Park in North Carolina for Grades 4-6 to learn to identify macroinvertebrates found in Lake Norman. Loose-leaf pages are presented in nine sections that contain: (1) introductions to the North Carolina State Park System, the Duke Power State Park, the park's…