EXPANDING THE IMPACT OF BEHAVIORAL STAFF MANAGEMENT: A LARGE-SCALE,LONG-TERM APPLICATION IN SCHOOLS SERVING SEVERELY HANDICAPPED STUDENTS

Experimental evaluations of behavioral staff management procedures usually have been limited to relatively small-scale demonstration studies. We evaluated a large-scale, long-term application of a staff management program designed to improve the functional utility of educational services for severely handicapped persons. The intervention, involving a brief in-service program followed by supervisory prompts and feedback, was implemented by three principals in four schools involving 21 classrooms. Implementation of the management procedures was consistently accompanied by increases in student involvement in functional educational tasks in each classroom. Further, the improved services continued throughout a 2-year follow-up period. Staff responses to a questionnaire indicated a high degree of staff acceptance of the management program. Results are discussed in terms of expanding the use of behavioral supervisory procedures from experimental demonstrations to actual adoption by existing human service agencies.     

THE FACILITATIVE EFFECTS OF INCIDENTAL TEACHING ON PREPOSITION USE BY AUTISTIC CHILDREN

In a comparison of incidental teaching and traditional training procedures, three language-delayed autistic children were taught expressive use of prepositions to describe the location of preferred edibles and toys. Traditional highly structured training and incidental teaching procedures were used in a classroom setting, and generalization was assessed during free-play sessions. Results clearly indicate that incidental teaching promoted greater generalization and more spontaneous use of prepositions. These findings have important implications for language programming and teacher training, suggesting that incidental teaching should be included as a standard component of language development curricula for autistic and other developmentally delayed children.     

Comparability of peer-assessment measures: A multitrait-multimethod and selection analytic approach

This research attempted to assess the relationship among the Pupil Evaluation Inventory (PEI), sociometric nominations, and sociometric ratings in terms of (1) a multitrait-multimethod analysis, (2) selection agreement indices of extreme individuals, and (3) stability over an 8-week period. Subjects were members of four second-grade classrooms at a regional school serving a diverse population of children. While stability estimates for measures were adequate and evidence for convergent validity was reasonably good, evidence for divergent validity was weaker. Selection agreement analyses yielded highly variable results, indicating that different samples of children tend to be selected by different instruments despite the similarity in dimensions being tapped. Methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.This work was based on the first author's M.S. thesis under the direction of the second author.     

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: A Case Study in Contested Ethics and the Public Uses of Professional Expertise

This article offers both an appreciative and critical review of Bandy Lee’s (ed.) book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. The book raises important questions about the ethical conundrum presented by a profession code of ethics containing both the Goldwater Rule’s requirement for practitioners to avoid diagnosis of public figures with whom they have no therapeutic relationship, and the Duty to Warn, which impels them to provide warnings when the risk of danger is suspected. Lee and her colleagues use their expertise in mental health to apply the criterion of dangerousness to the publically observable actions and behaviors of Trump. Authors also address the so called “Trump effect,” or the impact of the intersection between presidential pathologies and societal norms, including the rise of white nativist discourse. After assessing the book, the article considers its theological themes and implications for pastoral and practical theologians.     

Distinct pattern separation related transfer functions in human CA3/dentate and CA1 revealed using high-resolution fMRI and variable mnemonic similarity

Producing and maintaining distinct (orthogonal) neural representations for similar events is critical to avoiding interference in long-term memory. Recently, our laboratory provided the first evidence for separation-like signals in the human CA3/dentate. Here, we extended this by parametrically varying the change in input (similarity) while monitoring CA1 and CA3/dentate for separation and completion-like signals using high-resolution fMRI. In the CA1, activity varied in a graded fashion in response to increases in the change in input. In contrast, the CA3/dentate showed a stepwise transfer function that was highly sensitive to small changes in input.