Attitudes of Elementary Classroom Teachers Toward Mainstreaming

The purpose of this study was to investigate attitudes toward mainstreaming issues of elementary classroom teachers undertaking an introductory course in special education. Subjects were also queried about how they felt P.L. 94‐142 was perceived by other interested groups and indicated their estimates of the manageability of students with special needs within the regular classroom. Findings support the need for comprehensive in‐service training programs designed to modify attitudes of regular teachers.     

Project high hopes summer institute: Curriculum for developing talent in students with special needs

This article examines a summer institute curriculum that was developed for and used with handicapped students who were identified as gifted in the area(s) of visual arts, performing arts, engineering, or life sciences. The students and the summer institute were part of a federally funded Javits program, Project High Hopes. The curriculum was real world, multi‐disciplinary and problem based in that it used a decaying water feature on the school grounds as its focus. Using a creative problem solving process, students identified problems with the water feature, developed solutions, created presentations, and presented their solutions to the school board. Student products are described as are conclusions, results and possible implications for other educational settings.     

Cognitive Arithmetic Differences in Learning Difficulty Groups and the Role of Behavioral Inattention

The objectives of this study were to (1) evaluate group differences in specific arithmetic competencies among students with various types of learning difficulties (LD) and (2) to examine the influence of attention behaviors on possible group differences. Participants were a community sample of 291 third‐ and fourth‐grade students with reading difficulties (RD) and/or math difficulties (MD), or with no LD (51 MD, 66 RD, 89 MD + RD, and 85 No LD students). Students were administered computerized measures of cognitive addition, subtraction, and estimation (accuracy and response times), as well as other measures. Groups were compared with and without covariation for behavioral inattention and their interactions. Small sums addition, thought to reflect retrieval processes, estimation accuracy, and number knowledge, did not show differences between MD and MD + RD students, although both showed lower performance than the RD and No LD groups. Attention behavior had a variable impact, most typically making group differences larger, but did not alter the general pattern of group differences, except in the case of estimation.