The paper raises concerns about current intervention practices used with children who, while not handicapped, have academic and/or behavioral problems and who may be labeled handicapped. A lack of options for these high risk students is noted in regular programs, and the impact on the student and the system of the referral-to-testing-to-labeling…

AN UNGRADED 3- OR 4-YEAR READING PROGRAM INCORPORATES THE PHILOSOPHY THAT CONTINUOUS PROGRESS AND GROWTH SHOULD RECEIVE MAJOR EMPHASIS. PUPILS ARE PLACED IN ACHIEVEMENT GROUPS BASED ON READINESS FOR AND GROWTH IN READING RATHER THAN ON IQ PERFORMANCE. EACH CHILD PROGRESSES CONTINUOUSLY THROUGH 10 READING LEVELS ACCORDING TO HIS INDIVIDUAL GROWTH.…

In the Distar (Direct Instructional System for Teaching) reading program developed for inner city children, the fundamental assumption of the program's designers is that disadvantaged children lack certain basic language skills, information and behavioral patterns, which prevent them from mastering the reading process. This paper focuses upon the…

Compared were the performances of 45 normal and 45 slow learners (all in junior high school) on a task of original and relearning of paired associate responses as a result of induced success or failure following each response. Ss were asked to pair stick figures with consonant trigrams and then told their performance was either correct or wrong…

Chapters 1-3 of the special materials written for low achieving students in grades 7-8 by SMSG include flow charting, elementary coordinate geometry, and functions. Included for student use are many tables which are to be used to shorten computational processes. Each chapter also includes pretest exercises, instructional lessons and exercises, and…

Chapters 8-9 of the special materials written for low achieving students in grades 7-8 by SMSG deal with linear equations and geometric congruences. Included for each chapter are pretest exercises, a self-test, instructional lessons and exercises, and a chapter test. (CT)

Described as one of 34 booklets in a series of promising programs on childhood education, the report presents information on the Boston Public Schools Learning Laboratories (Massachusetts). The special approach for slow learners and gifted students in grades two through four is discussed in terms of purpose and structure, population served,…

Designed to gather evidence on the effectiveness of an intensive year of specific curriculum intervention on a severely disadvantaged population, the study involved 10 groups of approximately 14 psychosocially disadvantaged 5-year-olds each, for whom Stanford-Binet IQ scores were 50-85. Over 3 years, three groups were exposed to a diagnostic…

The basic purpose of this study was to determine the effects of telling prospective teachers that a classroom of adolescents, viewed on video tape, were low-achieving students. An experimental group was informed that the adolescents were slow learners having considerable difficulty in school. A control group, observing the same video tape was told…

Offering a variety of thoughts and courses for consideration, the theme for this particular issue is electives. Chapters include "How Can They Hear You When They're Snoring? An English Elective for Non-Motivated Students,""'The Literature of Alienation': An English Elective,""Elective Courses in English; A Giant Step toward Individualization and…

As part of continuing research aimed at identifying optimal methods for training Navy personnel who have achieved marginal scores on military selection tests, flash card instruction methods were adapted for application to a comprehensive range of basic mathematical operations involved in a previously developed course in fundamental mathematics.…

Offers an alternative to current beliefs about holistic learning and teaching. Describes task hierarchies that are closely based on children's information processing skills and that proceed in a systematic fashion from lower to higher levels. (AEW)

Described is the Music for Slow Learners Project in Great Britain which was designed to examine the special contribution music can make to the education of slow learning children. (IM)

The authors report on a study in which a response maze, which is calculated to provide the student with a task of intrinsic interest, is compared with other tasks involving external reinforcement. Six elementary school children are found to prefer the maze over external reinforcers. (RP)