Children with disabilities are reported to experience a high degree of directive parent interaction compared to typically developing children because of poor communicative or task skills. This study examines relationships between parent behaviors (directiveness and contingency) and child skills (language and motor) for children with physical or…

In this article, the authors consider optimal decision making in two-alternative forced-choice (TAFC) tasks. They begin by analyzing 6 models of TAFC decision making and show that all but one can be reduced to the drift diffusion model, implementing the statistically optimal algorithm (most accurate for a given speed or fastest for a given…

Persons with and without mental retardation who were matched on CA took part in three tasks: an inhibition of return task, a location negative-priming task, and an identity negative-priming task. Having participants perform all three tasks allowed us to correlate performance among the tasks and assess the various relationships among performance…

In 6 task-cuing experiments, with 2 cues per task, the authors varied cue-stimulus interval to investigate G. D. Logan and C. Bundesen's (2003) claim that when cue repetition is controlled for, task-switch cost and its reduction with preparation are largely eliminated and hence cannot index an endogenous control process. Experiment 1 replicates…

Compatibility level repetition benefits in interference paradigms have been taken to reflect enhanced processing selectivity in response to cognitive conflict elicited by a task-irrelevant stimulus feature. The authors demonstrate such sequential effects in the Simon task which (a) occur independent of previous behavioral conflict effects and (b)…

This discussion of validation procedures for learning hierarchies based on an analysis of a target skill of instruction to aid in the instructional development process indicates that there is no catalog of validated hierarchies available for this use, and that the literature provides little assistance to the developer seeking practical procedures.…

This document consists of the California State Department of Education Right to Read quarterly report form and a task time sheet. The quarterly report form asks for information on the participating school--grade levels of the school, current position, special funding, a brief description of the progress of each participating school in the program…

The report reviews a number of schemes designed to describe the human behaviors occurring during task performance. The purpose of the review is to assess whether such schemes will be useful in classifying tasks per se. Included in the review are schemes which employ such conceptual units as functions, abilities, and overt behaviors. In general,…

A program was conducted to develop a reliable, uniform recording system to describe activities of consultation, mental health education and community organization for program description and assessment which can be used in management and planning. 25 of 47 functioning programs, including regional branches of three county programs, were studied.…

The article describes a structured approach to teaching sign language to severely disabled students through task analysis. The approach emphasizes four basic principles from developmental and behavioral theories: (1) environmental influence, (2) imitation, (3) reinforcement, (4) practice. A functional sign vocabulary of 250 words grouped according…

The article identifies and describes the various dimensions of tasks in task analysis and cautions against an exclusive focus on content. A distinction between the subtasks of learning to do a task and actually doing it is made and the relationship of task analysis to evaluation and instruction presented. (Author/CL)

An overview of Robert M. Gagne's theoretical position of learning and instruction is presented with a discussion of possible applications and usefulness of the theory toward the development of technical instruction. (Author/AG)

In contrast to their instructional use, games may also be used for operational purposes. TAG deals with the process of task anslysis which is an important preliminary activity in instructional development. The game is designed for use by teams of instructional developers. (Author/JA)

Many of the difficulties in organizational structure studies could be attributed to the failure to distinguish between specialized (semi-skilled) and specialist (professional) workers. The concept of role variety, derived from information theory and designed to take account of the varying degrees of interchangeability of personnel at a particular…