Describes special benefits provided by group psychotherapy for adolescents with learning disabilities. Includes brief description of short-term psychotherapy groups and provides specific information about how one group was conducted. Two case vignettes depict how group process facilitated positive changes in interpersonal skills of adolescents in…

The article lists questions parents can use to evaluate the quality of educational services for children with learning disabilities. Questions are grouped into the following categories: services, agency and staff, residential or special schools, camps. (DB)

The article describes a two-year learning strategies program for ninth and tenth grade learning-disabled students which involves four tutorial periods and four learning strategy classes per week, and team teaching of strategy development in mainstream classes. The program has fostered independence and generalization of learned strategies to…

The article describes a four-step procedure for constructing two types of graphic organizers (hierarchical and compare/contrast) to help secondary academically handicapped students gain information from textbooks. Implementation methods include teacher-directed, student-directed with text references, and student-directed with clues. Testing…

The article reviews the research on composition and transcription writing skills conducted with elementary-aged learning-disabled students and published during the last five years. Conclusions are drawn concerning the influence of: text production method, specific interventions, text structure knowledge, word presentation form, and…

The instructional model for intervention research in learning disabilities includes three foci: (1) knowledge inculcation (including declarative, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge); (2) students' cognitive processing of their training activities; and (3) students' motivation to learn. Advantages of the model include ease of linking with any…

The ability of 54 learning-disabled high-school students to monitor their comprehension was compared under three prereading conditions: self-questions only, structured overviews and self-questions, and a control condition. Subjects receiving both the overviews and self-questions were best able to detect errors during reading. (Author/DB)

The study compared the effectiveness of providing elementary students with learning disabilities with either (1) instruction in both story structure and self-questioning techniques or (2) just training in story structure identification. The combined self-questioning and story structure group demonstrated the greatest gains in reading…

A study of 465 junior/senior high-school learning-disabled (LD) and seriously emotionally disturbed (SED) adolescents found that 21 percent experienced severe depressive symptomatology, with no severity differences exhibited between LD and SED students. Senior high females exhibited a more negative cognitive style than their male peers.…

The study investigated perceptions of the communication performance of 31 young adults with severe learning disabilities enrolled in a vocational education program. Students' perceptions of their own communication performance tended to be similar to those of the vocational educators. Both students and educators perceived problem solving as the…

This response argues that Linda Siegel's paper (EC221505) confuses measures of intelligence with predicted achievement, calls for doing away with the construct of learning disabilities rather than the discrepancy definition model, and overlooks the need to determine which students qualify for special educational services for treatment of learning…

The need for direct, systematic vocabulary instruction in improving language comprehension abilities of hearing-impaired and learning-disabled students is discussed. Vocabulary instruction should be knowledge-based and should be combined with extensive reading opportunities. Sample instructional techniques, such as word maps, semantic feature…

The review of the literature describes services available or recommended for students with learning disabilities at community colleges and traditional four-year colleges. Although a wide variety of services are now available, there is little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of those services. (Author/DB)

Research on text processing is reviewed including the role of text structure and summarization ability. Implications for the instruction of learning-disabled students include strategy instruction and instruction in such text processing skills as identifying main idea and identifying text structure. (DB)

The review of the Test of Written Language-2 (TOWL-2) raises concerns about alternate forms reliability, subtest reliability, content validity, and omissions. It concludes that the TOWL-2 is an expanded and greatly modified version of the original test but may not be appropriate for identifying a student's specific writing problems. (DB)