A Structured Approach to the Production of Teacher‐Education Materials: the ZeSTT experience

In a previous article in the Journal (Dickinson, 1982), the author described the production techniques that were utilised in the Zimbabwe Science Teacher Training Project (ZeSTT). In this second article, he outlines the production philosophy that lay behind the research programme, and which guided the approach adopted to the design, filming, editing and distribution of the materials produced.     

Violence and the changing universe of disabilities

The field of special education has primary responsibility for providing specialized services to young children with disabilities in the schools. Increasingly, it is recognized that many disabilities identified among young children may be attributable to environmental variables, such as violence, poverty, toxic materials exposure, and family dysfunction. Issues of violence hold particular relevance for special education professionals. Recent studies report that young children with disabilities are 1.7 times more likely to be victims of maltreatment than children without disabilities. For children with disabilities living with the effects of violence, the infrastructure of special education as it is now developing may be the most promising approach to individual and systems intervention. Comprehensive community-based initiatives are replacing fragmented practices. The new collaborations can multiply the results of intervention or support programs beyond those attainable through any single approach. Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect policies of the U.S. Department of Education.     

Two-choice conditional discrimination performance of pigeons as a function of reward expectancy,prechoice delay,and domesticity

In a discrete-trial two-choice conditional discrimination task, pigeons which received food for a correct choice following the presentation of one cue and water for a correct choice following another cue performed better than pigeons which received food and water equally often in both cases when delays of several seconds intervened between the conditional cue and choice stimuli presentations. These results suggest that feedback properties of reinforcer-specific expectancies can be important in conditional discrimination learning in pigeons. An additional finding was that wild-caught pigeons regularly exhibited a higher percentage of correct choices than domestic subjects.