EVALUATION OF THE CLASS PASS INTERVENTION FOR TYPICALLY DEVELOPING STUDENTS WITH HYPOTHESIZED ESCAPE‐MOTIVATED DISRUPTIVE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR

The aim of this study was to evaluate the Class Pass Intervention (CPI) as a secondary intervention for typically developing students with escape‐motivated disruptive classroom behavior. The CPI consists of providing students with passes that they can use to appropriately request a break from an academic task to engage in a preferred activity for preset amount of time. In addition, students are incentivized to not use the class passes by continuing to engage in the academic task and instead exchanging them for a preferred item or activity. Using an experimental single‐case withdrawal design with replication through a concurrent multiple‐baseline across‐participants design, the CPI was shown to reduce disruptive behavior and increase academic engagement in three students who engaged in hypothesized escape‐motivated behavior. Results also revealed that the effects of the CPI were maintained at a two‐week follow‐up probe and consumers found it to be acceptable. The limitations and implications of the findings for future research on effective classroom‐based interventions are discussed.     

Two-item<Emphasis Type="Italic">same-different</Emphasis> concept learning in pigeons

We report the first successful demonstration of a simultaneous, two-itemsame-different (S/D) discrimination by 6 pigeons, in which nonpictorial color and shape stimuli were used. This study was conducted because the majority of recently successful demonstrations of S/D discrimination in pigeons have employed displays with more than two items. Two pairs of stimulus items were simultaneously presented on a touch screen equipped computer monitor. Pigeons were reinforced for consistently pecking at either thesame (i.e., identical) or thedifferent (i.e., nonidentical) pair of items. These pairs were created from combinations of simple colored shapes drawn from a pool of six colors and six shapes. After acquiring the discrimination with item pairs that differed redundantly in both the shape and the color dimensions, the pigeons were tested for transfer to items that varied in only one of these dimensions. Although both dimensions contributed to the discrimination, greater control was exhibited by the color dimension. Most important, the discrimination transferred in tests with novel colored, shaped, and sized items, suggesting that the mechanisms involved were not stimulus specific but were more generalized in nature. These results suggest that the capacity to judge S/D relations is present in pigeons even when only two stimuli are used to implement this contrast.     

Variables that predict desire for work with special education adolescents

The target group was composed of professionals with a variety of psychology- and education-related roles. A set of variables was identified that could capture 75% of the variance associated with desire for work with special need adolescents. The variable set included participant perceptions of quality of special education training, as well as self-evaluation of personal characteristics such as sex, age, and attitudes toward special need adolescents.     

Retroactive interference in rat radial maze performance: The role of point of delay interpolation and the similarity and amount of interpolated material

The conditions necessary for producing retroactive interference (RI) were examined in a 12-arm radial maze. Rats were first given either three or nine forced choices in a to-be-remembered maze. During a 2-h delay, they received one or two trials in a second 12-arm maze, located either in a different room or the same room as the to-be-remembered maze. During the postdelay memory test, RI from the interference trials was produced only when nine choices had been made in the to-be-remembered maze and two interference trials had been conducted during the delay interval. RI was not found when only three forced choices had to be retained or after a single interference trial. The similarity between the interpolated and to-be-remembered mazes had no effect on choice accuracy. It was concluded that two conditions are required for the production of RI in the radial maze. First, a “large amount” of information should be resident in working memory. Second, a substantial number of interpolated trials or choices must be made during the delay.     

Adaptations for young children with visual impairments in regular settings

Adaptations must be made in order to maximize the learning potential of children with visual impairments to compensate for learning which occurs through visual observation. As the impetus for integration in national and state legislation accelerates, more young children with visual impairments are being educated in community settings with nondisabled peers. The purpose of this article is to provide the child-care and preschool teacher with information that may facilitate the development of children with visual impairments with integrated or inclusive settings.     

The relation between response and attentional shifts in pigeon compound matching-to-sample performance

Pigeons’ pecks to the two elements of spatially separated compound samples were observed during matching-to-sample performance. An attentional biasing procedure was used in which the birds were tested on a subset of the information contained in the sample (either one of the two dimensions or one of the two sample key locations) for a large number of sessions. This procedure resulted in a greater proportion of sample pecks to the positively biased (tested during biasing) sample attribute. Increases in accuracy on the positively biased attribute as well as decreases in accuracy on the negatively biased (not tested during biasing) attribute were also found. However, not all of the shifts in matching accuracy could be explained by the shifts in pecking behavior.     

Spatial and configural factors in compound stimulus processing by pigeons

Three matching-to-sample experiments examined whether spatial or configural factors determined how the element arrangement of compound sample stimuli influenced matching accuracy in pigeons. Seven types of compound stimuli were tested. The arrangement of color and line-orientation elements in these compounds varied in terms of the spatial separation between the elements, the degree of consistency in element spatial location, and the number of bounded areas containing the elements. Matching accuracy was examined upon initial exposure to the compounds, during asymptotic conditions of shared attention, and with variation of sample durations ranging from .04 to 5.935 sec. In all three experiments, when spatial proximity, locational certainty, and the number of lines were precisely controlled or equated, no evidence for the proposed configural processing of “unified” compounds was found (Lamb & Riley, 1981). Element spatial separation, and to a lesser degree perceptual limitations, determined compound performance. These results question our lab’s previous evidence for configural compound processing by pigeons (Lamb, 1988; Lamb & Riley, 1981). They suggest instead that pigeons independently and separately process the individual elements of color/line-orientation compounds, with element separation determining the distribution of processing between the elements.