Nine conference papers focus on the following topics related to the deaf-blind and their education: pitfalls in the coordination of assessment and treatment of handicapped children, promotion of adaptive patterns in the handicapped child, use of hearing in deaf-blind children, etiology of hearing loss, and the educator's assessment of visual functioning. Also discussed are Piaget's stages of cognitive development, the use of Piagetian constructs to study structures of development in children lacking normal cognitive development (the deaf-blind), the application of such a model to educational programing, and the application of the Piaget model to a sequential developmental task curriculum for pre-linguistic deaf-blind children. In the final two papers, implications for the deaf-blind from research on sensory integrative processes in learning disabled children are discussed and the symposium proceedings are synthesized. (KW)