Self-concept in educable mentally retarded and emotionally handicapped children

A total of 48 educable mentally retarded (EMR) and emotionally handicapped (EH) children ( \(\overline {CA} \) =137.7 months) were pretested on Coopersmith's Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI), Nowicki-Strickland's Locus of Control Scale for Children (LCSC), and 3 behavioral measures: (1) risk-taking, (2) a chance/skill task, and (3) delay of gratification. One group of 12 children from each population was then exposed to either a self-confident or a control model. After exposure, Ss were given an opportunity to perform successfully on an ambiguous task and answer questions about their success, and were readministered the SEI, LCSC, and 3 behavioral choices. Correlational analyses of pretreatment data revealed significant relationships between defensiveness and LCSC, SEI, and delay of gratification and a near-significant relationship between LCSC and SEI. EMR and EH Ss were both lower on self-esteem than the general population, while EMR Ss were more defensive, more external, and less likely to delay gratification than EH Ss. Both treated groups matched more of the behavioral choices than the control groups, while only treated EH Ss were more likely to attribute their success to internal causes. It was concluded that EMR and EH children differ in self-concept development and that future attempts to modify self-concept should include greater modeling exposure as well as increased opportunity for performance with its resultant feedback.     

Hierarchical semantic organization in educable mentally retarded children.

Fifty-four educable mentally retarded (EMR) children looked at eight familiar pictures. Subsequently they attempted to recall each picture when given as retrieval cues the corresponding noun and four other words that represented a hierarchical class inclusion system for that particular picture. Five predictions based on a model of semantic distance in the structure were tested. Four of the predictions were significantly confirmed. Thus, EMR children showed evidence of functional use of a hierarchical class inclusion system in memory retrieval. These results are not suggested by most of the relevant literature in mental retardation.     

Social problem solving and mother-child interactions of educable mentally retarded children

Mothers of retarded children and nonretarded children were observed and videotaped as they interacted with their own child in a seminaturalistic situation, requiring teaching, cooperation, and free play. The child's social problem-solving abilities were assessed independently. The Vineland scale was employed to provide some convergent evidence of social problem-solving as a component of social competence. Twelve educable mentally retarded and 19 nonretarded 10-year-old children and their mothers comprised the sample. For the mentally retarded group, it was found that the higher maternal directiveness, the lower the child's social problem-solving skills. Mothers who often gave the child opportunity for decision-making and social influence had children with higher problem-solving skills. The retarded children produced significantly fewer different strategies for solving social problems, but gave a wider range of strategies than has been found in previous research. There was some support that social problem-solving skills are related to social maturity.     

Maintenance and generalization of a semantic rehearsal strategy in educable mentally retarded children

Two groups of 11- to 12-year-old educable mentally retarded children, equated on the basis of a free recall pretest, were given a series of lists for free recall. Approximately half the subjects were trained in the use of a strategy designed to induce deeper level semantic encoding and the discovery of categorical relationships and half constituted a “no-training” control group with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. There was evidence not only that the semantic strategy was maintained over the 1-week delay, but that it also generalized to word lists unlike those used during training. The degree of generalization was greater for those subjects receiving related lists during training.     

Verbal elaboration and the promotion of transfer of training in educable mentally retarded children

The ability of 23 educable retarded children to transfer verbal elaboration techniques to a standard paired-associate task was tested following one, two, or no elaboration experiences. An additional 18 retardates were tested in two outside control conditions, which were used to identify the effects of reversal experience (R-S recall) on acquisition and transfer. Since analyses revealed no differences in performance attributable to reversal experience, the two outside control conditions were combined with the appropriate experimental conditions for further statistical analyses. Relative to the performance of subjects not receiving elaboration experience, those receiving one elaboration experience showed little evidence of transfer while those receiving two elaboration experiences revealed quite clear transfer performance. The relevance of these findings to previous failures to find transfer and their implications for educational practice are discussed.     

Enhancing the creative problem-solving skills of educable mentally retarded students

60 educable mentally retarded students from 3 schools in a large urban school system received 9 wk. of instruction from an adaptation of the Productive Thinking Program. Their performance on measures of creative thinking was compared with that of 60 students who received no additional instruction. The conclusions drawn were that (1) special attention to creative thinking training for educable mentally retarded students may be quite effective and results stable over time and (2) the measures of fluency, flexibility, and originality are the most useful in assessing creative thinking for this group.     

Flexibility training with educable retarded children

This experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that training in perceptual and cognitive shifts would improve the performance of EMR children on flexibility measures and on the Binet and WISC scales. Twenty-eight children received 42 exercises in cognitive flexibility and were compared to a control group that was matched on mental age. Instruction facilitated performance on variables measuring verbal fluency and concept formation; however, significant improvement was generally limited to those variables which shared content with the training exercises.     

The ability to encode facial and emotional expressions by educable mentally retarded and nonretarded children.

The object of the present study was to investigate whether 20 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children matched for verbal mental age on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT; Dunn, 1965) with 20 nonretarded (NR) controls were adept in identifying emotional facial expressions and producing the equivalent word adjectives. I also reassessed the relationship between the phase of identifying facial expressions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, and scared) and the phase of producing emotional word adjectives, consisting of 16 emotional linguistic constructions (4 short stories for each of the adjectives) between higher in verbal ability educable mentally retarded (HEMR) children and higher in verbal ability nonretarded controls (HNRC) and between low in verbal ability educable mentally retarded (LEMR) children and low in verbal ability nonretarded controls (LNRC). There were no significant differences between EMR and NR children in general, despite the fact that EMR children had deficits in receptive linguistic competence.     

Perceptual learning by educable mentally retarded, average, and gifted children of primary school age

A match-to-sample task and a preference-ranking procedure were used to provide predifferentiation experiences on a color discrimination for 6- and 8-yr.-old children. The subjects included an educable mentally retarded 8-yr.-old group, an average 8-yr.-old group, a gifted 6-yr.-old group, and an average 6-yr.-old group. Mental age was the best predictor of success on task. A significant interaction of sex and teaching method suggests an advantage of girls in this group in instructional situations in which the perceptual learning task and testing tasks are not exactly the same. Girls did better than boys when a different response for task content was required in testing from that in teaching. Boys and girls performed similarly when the training task was the same as the testing task.     

The sufficient conditions for directed forgetting in normal and educable mentally retarded adolescents

A series of studies investigated the conditions under which normal and educable mentally retarded adolescents (13 to 15 years old) would or would not disregard irrelevant information in memory. A directed forgetting task was used in which the person was required to recall short sequences of picture names. In some sequences there was a cue to forget the first few pictures (irrelevant information) and to remember only the subsequent pictures (relevant information). When normal adolescents were given no explanation of the forget cue, there was interference from the irrelevant information. A minimum explanation of the cue, however, was sufficient to eliminate interference for the normal adolescents. The same minimal explanation was not sufficient for mentally retarded adolescents. It was clear that irrelevant information in memory interfered with the performance of retarded adolescents given only a minimal explanation of the forget cue. These results are important since most naturalistic situations do not involve an elaborate explanation of the importance of disregarding irrelevant information previously stored in memory.     

Premotor and motor reaction time of educable mentally retarded youths in a Taekwondo program

This study investigated the educational effect of a Taekwondo program on premotor and motor reaction time in high school students who were mentally retarded but educable. Subjects were voluntarily recruited from the Special High School for the Mentally Retarded in Busan, South Korea. Subjects were divided into a trained group (n = 10) and a control group (n = 10) with balanced ages, physical conditions, and IQ. Subjects took part in pretests after practicing a Taekwondo motion 10 times with a signal presented randomly between 2 and 8 sec. after "Ready!" The motion was raising the right knee powerfully enough to crush a pine board. Subjects in the trained group took a Taekwondo course three times a week for 7 mo. This program was designed for the cognitive and physical characteristics of mentally retarded persons. After 7 mo., all subjects underwent posttests like the pretests. A four-channel EMG analyzing device (LAXTHA Inc., 2001) recorded EMG activity. Analysis of co-variance analyzed the difference of mean pre- and posttests for the two groups. For premotor RT, mean performance of the groups showed no significant difference, but significant improvement in mean motor RT by the trained group (p <.01) was noted.     

Semantic and acoustic processing in free and cued recall by educable mentally retarded adolescents

The abilities of educable mentally retarded adolescents to encode and retrieve words with semantic and acoustic cues were investigated in a free and cued recall task. On each of three trial blocks, seven groups of subjects were presented 20 unrelated stimulus words. Groups received either semantic, acoustic, or no encoding cues along with the stimuli. Free recall was requested from all subjects, followed immediately by a second period of either free recall or cued recall with the semantic or acoustic cues. Semantic cues were most effective when presented both at encoding and retrieval. The subjects were unable to use acoustic information as effective retrieval aids. Results were discussed in terms of encoding dimension dominance and mediational deficiencies.