Educational outcome of neonatal intensive care graduates.

Studies of developmental outcome of neonatal intensive care unit graduates have generally been limited to the first 2 to 3 years of life, with outcome determined by psychometric tests. This study followed neonatal intensive care unit graduates born 1975 through 1983 (n = 457) into the public school system and compared their educational outcomes with those of newborn nursery graduates (n = 656). Outcomes were evaluated by placement in four academic categories: regular classroom, academic problems, speech/language impairment, and major impairment. Educational outcomes for children of both groups were essentially the same. Their placement in the four academic categories were equally affected by nonmedical variables, primarily income (below/above poverty level), race, and sex. Seventy percent of poverty-level children were in one of the three problem categories, compared with 40% of children above poverty level. Neither neonatal intensive care unit treatment nor low birth weight were major predictors of educational outcome. The only clear-cut neonatal intensive care unit effect occurred among children born with sensory or physical impairments. Therefore, in order to reduce poor educational outcomes, follow-up and intervention programs should be targeted primarily to children with diagnosable handicaps and from minority, low-income families.

The effectiveness of currently enrolled student proctors in an undergraduate special education course.

Potential users of Keller's personalized college classroom method might find it impractical to provide student proctors from the ranks of those who had previously mastered the course material. An alternative is to let currently enrolled students proctor and tutor each other. Such a method imposes the burden of showing that its effectiveness is not a function of (1) student collaboration or (2) the effects of "practice" received by students who listen to the performance of others before their own performance. The present study compared students proctored by previously trained students (Control) with students who received proctoring from classmates (Experimental). Experimental group performance was superior to Control group performance. The effects of "practice" and collaboration were ruled out as determinants of the difference between groups. It is hypothesized that the superior performance of the Experimental students was related to their activities as proctors.

Effects of wait-time and intertrial interval durations on learning by children with multiple handicaps.

We investigated the influence of teacher wait-time and intertrial interval durations on the performance of 4 multiply handicapped students during instruction in 10 skills. Four experimental conditions were evaluated: long wait-time and long intertrial interval, long wait-time and short intertrial interval, short wait-time and long intertrial interval, and short wait-time and short intertrial interval. Instructors attempted to keep short intervals as close as possible to 1 s and long intervals as close as possible to 10 s for both variables. Results showed that student performance was superior under the long wait-time conditions irrespective of the length of the intertrial interval.

Effects of oral reading rate and inflection on intraverbal responding.

Reading comprehension may be defined as a type of intraverbal responding. Only a few studies have reported the effects of the rate and inflection of oral reading performances on this class of intraverbals. In the present study the effects of four conditions; low reading rates (40 to 60 words per minute), with and without inflection, and high reading rates (150 to 200 words per minute), with and without inflection, were studied using six subjects. Two of the subjects were of high school age, reading below grade level, and four were typical third grade students, reading on grade level. The results indicated that the combination of high oral reading rate with inflection, a condition approximating conversational speech, increased both the accuracy and speed of intraverbal responding (comprehension), more than any other combination of variables. A second experiment was conducted which systematically replicated the findings across reading levels, reading passage content, settings, and subjects.