Effects of curriculum within curriculum-based measurement.

This study assessed the effects of curriculum on technical features within curriculum-based measurement in reading. Curriculum was defined as the difficulty of material and the basal series from which students read. Technical features were the criterion validity and developmental growth rates associated with the measurement. Ninety-one students took a commercial, widely used test of reading comprehension and read orally for 1 minute from each of 19 passages, one from each grade level within two reading series. Correlations between the oral reading samples and the test of reading comprehension were similar across difficulty levels and across series. Developmental growth rates also remained strong regardless of difficulty level and series.

Terminology and behavior reduction: the case against "punishment".

Controversy continues to rage over the application of punishment or aversive procedures in treatment and habilitation. A lack of clear definition of terms may be contributing to confusion in the debate. Tracing the history of the term punishment shows that its retention as a description of a behavioral process is due primarily to happenstance. The unfortunate choice of a word long associated with cruel and inhumane treatment has led to considerable confounding of the technical and traditional usages in public debate. The alternative term, aversive, is of more recent origin, yet it also suffers from inconsistent usage and some degree of negative association. Important questions concerning the appropriateness of behavior reduction procedures are made more difficult to answer when those procedures are designated by names laden with surplus meaning. Attempts by professional associations to address the behavior reduction dilemma offer opportunities for implementing more precise, less pejorative terms. Toward that end a conceptual framework is presented that could guide the choice of an alternative terminology for behavior reduction.

Educating students with mild disabilities in general education classrooms: Minnesota alternatives.

This article reports two major data collection efforts conducted during successive years. Study 1 examined the relationship between the school effectiveness variables identified in the Minnesota Educational Effectiveness Project (MEEP), and the attitudes and achievement of students in 31 MEEP schools. Study 2, which focused on 11 of the Study 1 schools, compared the instructional programs provided to students with mild disabilities in three integrated programs in these 11 schools, with those provided by conventional resource "pull-out" programs in three other schools. We not only contrasted program characteristics, but analyzed differences between program characteristics and cognitive and affective outcomes. Results do not provide a strong basis for concluding that general efforts at school improvement will provide the framework for improved outcomes among low-achieving students.