Faculty members' provision of instructional accommodations to students with LD

The existing research on the instructional accommodation process of college students with learning disabilities focuses on attitudes and theoretical models without delineating actual practices. To date, the discussion of facilitating factors and barriers to this process has been broad and lacking specificity. Surveys were mailed to 485 faculty members at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who received an instructional accommodation form from the office of Learning Disabilities Support Services in the fall of 1995. The survey focused on faculty members' reported degree of ease or difficulty in implementing instructional accommodations, their perceptions regarding adequacy of support, and their own beliefs and understandings concerning the need for and benefit of providing instructional accommodations. The results indicate that beliefs about the helpfulness of and need for instructional accommodations were associated with the provision of the accommodations. Also, a perception of support from the University influenced the ease of providing instructional accommodations. A significant difference was found between the behavior of tenure-track faculty and non-tenure-track faculty.     

Operant responding by bonnet macaques for color videotape recordings of social stimuli

Socially reared juvenile bonnet macaques responded at high sustained levels in an operant task for presentation of color videotaped television images of social stimuli. Absolute levels of response depended upon the nature of the stimulus. In two experiments, subjects responded at 60.8% and 74.6% of the 1-h experimental sessions for presentation of a color videotape of a conspecific adult female moving freely in an enclosed stimulus chamber. In a later experiment, subjects maintained high levels of response during 15-min sessions for presentations of the conspecific image, but responded with significantly shorter duration responses for similar presentation of a videotape of an adult female of another macaque species, a still picture of a conspecific adult female, and a videotape of the empty stimulus chamber. With longer, 1-h, stimulus presentation, the three social stimuli sustained high levels of response while responses for presentation of the empty stimulus chamber waned significantly over the experimental session. The sustained high levels of response obtained over several hours of stimulus presentation suggest the value of color videotape stimuli in the experimental study of social perception in nonhuman primates.