Notice and consent: The school's responsibility to inform parents

Parental involvement in planning and placement for 20 children initially referred for special education is described in light of the PL 94-142 requirements for informed parental consent. The pattern of notification and parental involvement in the planning and placement team in four elementary schools is described, and the level of parental understanding for four components of the special education decision (eligibility, placement, program goals, and review date) is examined. Comparisons indicate that parent's versions of each decision component were clear and accurate no more than 50% of the time for any of the four components, even though parents were present at the team meeting where these decisions were rendered. The highest accuracy in parental reports was for the placement decision, while unclear or erroneous versions of decisions regarding eligibility, program goals, and review date were even more frequent. Results are interpreted in light of the amount of change demanded of local school systems to insure that parents are giving informed consent for special education planning and placement decisions.     

Ripple effect: Communication of planning team decisions to program implementers

Due process provisions are intended to insure that special education placement and programming decisions are fair. However, educators should address the issue of whether those decisions are properly implemented. This paper explores how placement decisions are communicated to the teachers and support personnel who are responsible for implementing students' special education programs. The communication network used by planning teams was characterized as informal; most information was communicated orally by many different planning team members. The results were discussed in the context of whether the messages provided to program implementers were consistent and clear.     

Specificity of practice, visual information, and intersegmental dynamics in rapid-aiming limb movements

The authors tested the specificity of practice hypothesis on intersegmental dynamics of rapid-aiming limb movements. During acquisition, 20 participants performed an aiming task as quickly and accurately as possible either with or without vision. Following moderate (140 trials) and extensive (560 trials) practice, participants completed 20 transfer test trials in a no-vision condition. Overall, the acquisition-phase findings revealed that vision improved aiming accuracy performance but had only a slight impact on movement time and intersegmental dynamics. After 560 trials of practice, however, withdrawal of vision resulted in specificity of practice effects on intersegmental dynamics at the shoulder as well as on aiming accuracy. Taken together, those findings support and extend the specificity of practice hypothesis     

Shifting ontological boundaries: how Japanese‐ and English‐speaking children generalize names for animals and artifacts

Past research shows that young language learners know something about the different category organizations of animals, objects and substances. The three experiments reported here compare Japanese‐speaking and English‐speaking children's novel name generalizations for two kinds of objects: clear instances of artifacts and objects with ambiguous features suggestive of animates. This comparison was motivated by the very different nature of individuation in the two languages and by the boundary shift hypothesis that proposes that entities that straddle the individuation boundary of a language are assimilated toward the individuated side. The results of the three experiments support the hypothesis. An explanation in terms of mutually reinforcing correlations among language, perceptual properties and category structure is proposed.