Improving the spelling performance of students with disabilities

The present study examined the effects of an error correction strategy on the spelling accuracy of students with emotional and/or learning disabilities. The strategy, which asked students to spell a word, view a correct model, and then correct their errors, was compared to a traditional strategy that asked students to write words three times each while viewing a correct model. Results showed that students learned more words in the error correction condition than in the traditional condition. The error correction treatment was shown to be an effective strategy that reduced the number of repetitive spelling practice trials, and was preferred by students.     

Childhood stress: Perceptions of children and professionals

An assessment instrument was developed to measure children's perceptions of stressors in their lives, as well as their experiences and emotional reactions to these stressors. Two approaches from the adult literature, major life events and daily hassles, were compared for children. In addition, a comparison between children's and professionals' ratings of the severity of various stressors was made, as well as an examination of the relationship of experience and self-reported reaction to children's ratings. Results indicate that children's ratings of the severity of stressors do differ from adults', particularly when children have experienced the stressor. Further investigation in the study of childhood stress incorporating children's perceptions is proposed.     

Interpersonal Features of Interviews Between Psychiatric Patients and Nursing Staff1

Observer ratings of one-half hour interviews were undertaken to test two basic concepts of interpersonal relations in a sample of 51 randomly paired male psychiatric patients and female psychiatric nurses. It was hypothesized that the behavior of psychiatric patients could be organized around two orthogonal dimensions reflecting status and feeling, and that patients and nurses would exhibit complementary interpersonal behavior consistent with their institutionally ascribed roles. Interviews were rated with the Leary Interpersonal Checklist. Interjudge reliability was established for Leary's coding system. The hypothesis of status and feeling reference points for patient behavior received strong support when the results of analysis of variance were supplemented by factor analysis. Patient scores on the eight variables measured by the Leary Interperonsal Checklist and nurses' scores for 17 complementary variables were submitted to correlational analysis to test the hypothesis of interpersonal complementarity. As predicted, two hypothesized dependence-assistance response combinations provided the highest correlation coefficients. It was concluded that the study provided empirical support for the utility of an interpersonal model within psychiatric settings that has more commonly been identified with relationships free of psychiatric disturbance.     

Psychopathy and structure of primary mental abilities

The Comprehensive Ability Battery (CAB) was used to assess 18 primary mental abilities in 53 white, male prison inmates for whom highly reliable ratings of psychopathy were available. None of the correlations between ratings of psychopathy and scores on the CAB tests was significant, and the overall pattern or structure of abilities was the same for inmates with low and high ratings of psychopathy. The possibility is raised that the personality characteristics of psychopaths make them appear to be brighter and more creative than they actually are. Compared with norms for male high school students, the inmates as a group generally performed well, falling near the 50th percentile on 11 of the tests. The inmates performed significantly better than the normative sample on tests of verbal ability, esthetic judgment, aiming, and representational drawing, and significantly worse on tests of ideational fluency, spontaneous flexibility, and word fluency.This research was supported by Grant MT-4511 from the Medical Research Council of Canada.     

The response to injustice: Effects of varying levels of social support and position of advantage or disadvantage

This study investigated the effects of varying levels of social support as well as position of advantage or disadvantage on subjects' response to injustice. Conditions of advantage and disadvantage were established by randomly assigning one member of each experimental dyad to a method of working which prevented him/her from earning points for prizes. Three levels of social support (“none,” “peer,” “authoritative”) were created. Advantaged and disadvantaged subjects receiving authoritative support for the possibility of change and disadvantaged subjects receiving peer support in the form of divided opinion statements rated the system as less fair than either group in the absence of support or the advantaged receiving only peer support. Disadvantaged subjects evidenced a tendency to assume personal responsibility for their lower outcomes. Social support reduced this tendency but did not eliminate it.     

TEACHING SELF-ADMINISTRATION OF SUCTIONING TO CHILDREN WITH TRACHEOSTOMIES

We examined the effectiveness of using dolls to teach young children with tracheostomies to self-administer a suctioning procedure. Four children between the ages of 5 and 8 years, who had had tracheostomies for 6 months or longer, participated. After skills were taught via doll-centered simulations, in vivo skills were evaluated. All of the training and probe sessions were conducted in the participants' classrooms or homes. Results of a multiple baseline design across subjects and skill components indicated that the performance of all children improved as a function of training. Skill maintenance was demonstrated by all participants during follow-up assessments conducted 2 to 6 weeks posttraining. Results of a questionnaire completed by caregivers and interviews with the children revealed high levels of satisfaction with the training procedures and outcomes.     

Skilled memory in expert figure skaters

The present studies extend skilled-memory theory to a domain involving the performance of motor sequences. Skilled figure skaters were better able than their less skilled counterparts to perform short skating sequences that were choreographed, rather than randomly constructed. Expert skaters encoded sequences for performance very differently from the way in which they encoded sequences that were verbally presented for verbal recall. Tasks interpolated between sequence and recall showed no significant influence on recall accuracy, implicating long-term memory in skating memory. There was little evidence for the use of retrieval structures when skaters learned the brief sequences used throughout these studies. Finally, expert skaters were able to judge the similarity of two skating elements faster than less skilled skaters, indicating a faster access to semantic memory for experts. The data indicate that skaters show many of the same skilled-memory characteristics as have been described in other skill domains involving memorization, such as digit span and memory for dinner orders.