A workshop showed clinical faculty how to evaluate marginal or borderline students by identifying problems, gathering data, and designing interventions. Case scenarios demonstrated how to deal with the stress of assessing marginal students. (SK)

Examines aspects of intellectual, linguistic, and academic abilities of children with moderate learning difficulties, and analyzes a profile of these abilities. Explores the relationships among several aspects of academic achievement and biographical factors. Provides a rationale for a long-term intervention study designed to develop these…

Fossilization is a the term used generally to denote what appears to be a state of permanent failure on the part of a second-language learner to acquire a given feature of the target language. This article reviews different accounts of this phenomenon and offers another account. The implications of this new account of fossilization for…

Summarizes research for teaching writing to students with learning problems. Develops, from the literature review, a checklist of instructional features and uses of the checklist to examine two fifth-grade basal textbooks. Concludes by recommending modifications: add modeling to the instruction, make parts of the instruction more explicitly…

School-based consultation teams have been implemented in a variety of ways to address students' academic and behavioral difficulties while supporting teachers. Discusses how computer software offers an effective and efficient means of guiding diverse team members through a comprehensive consultation process. (Contains 31 references.) (GCP)

Notes that the prevalence of reading difficulty was 8.2% and it was associated with younger age, males, poverty, less-educated parents, psychiatric disturbance, school failure, poor school attendance, physical ill-health, poor motor co-ordination and impaired vocabulary and visuospatial reasoning. Supports a multifactorial causal model of reading…

Discussion of school violence and student misbehavior reviews research showing that violent and unsafe student behaviors are the outcome of a predictable chain of events that begins with academic failure. The paper urges a greater emphasis on effective academic instruction in any efforts to prevent school violence and improve school safety.…

Seeks to help dental educators recognize potential causes of students' learning problems by presenting a series of diagnostic questions designed to identify the underlying etiology of the learning deficiency. Introduces strategies for helping the academically struggling student based on these etiologies. (EV)

The Gulliford Lecture 2003 was given by Professor Ann Lewis of the School of Education at the University of Birmingham. Professor Lewis's lecture, on which this article is based, focused on the process of listening to the views of children and, in particular, children with learning difficulties. Following the near-universal ratification of the…

To investigate mechanisms of failure in mathematics, we adopt the "communicational approach to cognition," which describes thinking as an activity of communication and learning mathematics as an initiation to a certain type of discourse. In the search for factors that impede students' participation in arithmetic communication, we examine…

There may be many different reasons why children have problems paying attention. One child might be visually oversensitive. Another child, who is oversensitive to smells, might be distracted by the teachers' perfume. Auditory sensitivity can be just as distracting. As such, it is important to remember that children with developmental difficulties…

The aim of this study was to examine the inclusion of a pupil with a severe general learning difficulty in a four-teacher mainstream primary school, located in rural Ireland. The research employed a qualitative multiple operationism approach to data collection. Data were analysed qualitatively, and quantitative reporting and display procedures…

This study examined the factors that constrain the working memory span performance and reading ability of individuals with generalized learning difficulties. In the study, 50 individuals with learning difficulties (LD) and 50 typically developing children (TD) matched for reading age completed two working memory span tasks. Participants also…

An artificial grammar learning task was used to define two learning tasks of identical complexity at the symbolic level, but which differed in terms of stimulus format. The stimuli in one learning task were created so as to encourage participants to perceive each stimulus as a whole, with less emphasis on the stimulus constituent elements (the…

This article describes changes experienced by a multidisciplinary team of the Center for Learning Disabilities in Tirat Carmel, Israel, in the wake of the enactment of the country's Special Education Law. Over the course of several years, the team working at the Center was able to adapt to the changes, while preserving the professional level of…