The President’s New Freedom Commission: Capitalizing on Opportunities to Advance School-Based Mental Health Services

The report from President George W. Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC), Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America(2003), proposes goals and recommendations for improving mental health services. This report has significant implications for the delivery of mental health services through the schools. A focused discussion of the potential opportunities and challenges of implementing NFC recommendations related to school-based mental health is presented. Strategies for addressing five key areas at the intersection of school mental health and the Commission’s recommendations include: stigma reduction, suicide prevention, expansion and improvement of school mental health, and screening and treatment of co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders.     

Refining the experimental analysis of academic skills deficits: Part I. An investigation of variables that affect generalized oral reading performance

Experimental analyses for improving reading fluency deficits have rarely targeted generalized increases in academic responding. As a consequence, the variables that may help students to generalize newly learned forms of academic responding like reading are not well understood. Furthermore, experimental analyses of reading fluency interventions have not systematically examined difficulty level as a variable that may affect instructional outcomes. The experiment reported in this paper expands (a) the measurement of the dependent variables to include generalized increases across tasks (reading passages) and (b) the combination of independent variables used to produce measurable generalized increases. The results demonstrate the importance of combining reward and instructional variables (including difficulty level) to produce generalized increases and how those variables can be meaningfully investigated prior to making treatment recommendations.     

Got Those PL 94–142 Blues

The implementation of PL 94–142 has made a definite impact on the school counselor. The demands on a counselor's time and energy were not anticipated. This article discusses what is actually happening and why it is happening. Some suggestions are given about what can be done to help the counselor in a local setting.     

The Role of Attention in Word Recognition: Results from OB1-Reader

When reading, orthographic information is extracted not only from the word the reader is looking at, but also from adjacent words in the parafovea. Here we examined, using the recently introduced OB1-reader computational model, how orthographic information can be processed in parallel across multiple words and how orthographic information can be integrated across time and space. Although OB1-reader is a model of text reading, here we used it to simulate single-word recognition experiments in which parallel processing has been shown to play a role by manipulating the surrounding context in flanker and priming paradigms. In flanker paradigms, observers recognize a central word flanked by other letter strings located left and right of the target and separated from the target by a space. The model successfully accounts for the finding that such flankers can aid word recognition when they contain bigrams of the target word, independent of where those flankers are in the visual field. In priming experiments, in which the target word is preceded by a masked prime, the model accounts for the finding that priming occurs independent of whether the prime and target word are in the same location or not. Crucial to these successes is the key role that spatial attention plays within OB1-reader, as it allows the model to receive visual input from multiple locations in parallel, while limiting the kinds of errors that can potentially occur under such spatial pooling of orthographic information.     

Improving reading outcomes for children with learning disabilities: using brief experimental analysis to develop parent-tutoring interventions

The present study assessed the effects of summer parent tutoring on 3 children with learning disabilities using empirically derived reading interventions. Brief experimental analyses were used to identify customized reading fluency interventions. Parents were trained to use the intervention strategies with their children. Parents implemented the procedures during parent-tutoring sessions at home and results were measured continuously in high-word-overlap and low-word-overlap passages to determine whether generalization occurred. Parent and child satisfaction with the procedures was assessed. Results demonstrated generalized increases in reading fluency in both high-word-overlap and low-word-overlap passages as a function of parent tutoring. Also, acceptability ratings by children and their parents indicated that they viewed the interventions as acceptable and effective. Results are discussed in terms of structuring reading fluency interventions that promote generalization and maintenance of treatment effects.     

Effects of stimulus duration and inter-letter spacing on letter-in-string identification

Effects of stimulus duration and inter-letter spacing were studied in a letter-in-string identification paradigm. Participants were shown strings of 5 random consonants (e.g., PGKDM) centered on fixation and were asked to identify the letter that had appeared at a post-cued location. Stimulus duration was manipulated in Experiment 1 (13 ms–91 ms), and inter-letter spacing manipulated in Experiment 2 (for a fixed stimulus duration of 26 ms). We contrasted performance to outer-letters (positions 1 and 5) with non-central inner letters (positions 2 and 4), the first-letter (position 1) with the final letter (position 5), and the central-letter (position 3) with the other inner letters (positions 2 and 4). The outer-letter advantage and the first-letter advantage were present throughout the entire range of exposure durations, whereas the central-letter advantage increased with longer exposures. On the other hand, increased spacing reduced both the outer-letter advantage and the first-letter advantage, whereas it led to a greater central-letter advantage. Changes in acuity and crowding as a function of stimulus exposure and inter-letter spacing, can account for this pattern of results.     

Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau‐Ponty Claims It Can?

Merleau‐Ponty's reversibility thesis argues that self, other and world are inherently relational, interdependent at the level of ontology. What is at stake in the reversibility thesis is whether it overcomes skeptical objections in both assuring real communication and avoiding solipsism in assuring real difference; the Other must be a genuine, irreducible Other. It is objected that across the domains of reversibility, symmetry and reciprocity are not guaranteed. I argue that this is a non‐problem; rather the potentialities for asymmetry and non reciprocity in fact guarantee the irreducibility of the Other; reversibility needs to be appreciated as dialectical or aesthetic, not as a literal or ‘mechanistic’ reversal. A further criticism targets the viability of ontology itself, whether alterity is ever compatible with ontology. This paper considers these objections from two of Merleau‐Ponty's contemporaries—Claude Lefort and Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas developed a philosophy which while intersecting with Merleau‐Ponty's at important junctures, nonetheless arrived at an entirely different destination. I argue alongside Martin Dillon against the objections of Lefort, and alongside Dan Zahavi against the objections of Levinas. Both of these interpreters, I propose remain faithful to the core directions and spirit of Merleau‐Ponty's endeavours without becoming diverted by the less significant inconsistencies.