This article addresses the question of costs associated with the remediation of learning disabilities. It is argued that whenever such practical considerations as teacher- or student-time prevail, the question of whether or not the training procedure is economical should be addressed. To accomplish such a cost analysis, the design must specify a meaningful scale along which costs may be gauged. The argument is illustrated with an experiment that utilized a fading technique to teach preschool children to correctly label p's and q's.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Bond, G.L., Dystra, R., The cooperative research in first-grade reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 1967, 2, 5-142.
2.
Davidson, H.P., Study of confusing letters, b, d, p, and q. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1935, 47, 458-468.
3.
Evans, R.A., Bilsky, L.H., Effects of letter-reversals training on the discrimination performance of EMR children. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 1975, 80, 99-108.
4.
Fisher, M.A., Zeaman, D., An attention-retention theory of retardate discrimination learning . In N. R. Ellis (Ed.), International Review of Research in Mental Retardation (Vol. 6). New York: Academic Press, 1973.
5.
Gibson, E.J., Gibson, J.J., Pick, A.D., Osser, H.A., Developmental study of the discrimination of letter-like forms. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1962, 55, 897-906.
6.
Hendrickson, L.N., Muehl, S., The effect of attention and motor response pretraining on learning to discriminate b and d in kindergarten children. Journal of Educutional Psychology , 1962, 53, 236-241.
7.
Jeffrey, W.E., Variables in early discrimination learning: I. Motor responses in the training of left-right discriminations. Child Development , 1958, 29, 269-275.
8.
Lawrence, D.H., The transfer of discrimination along a continuum. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1952, 45, 511-516.
9.
Moyer, S.B., Newcomer, P.L., Reversals in reading: Diagnosis and remediation. Exceptional Children, 1977, 43, 424-429.
10.
Pavloy, I.P., [Conditioned Reflexes] (G. V. Anrep, trans.). London: Oxford University Press, 1927.
Popp, H.M., The measurement and training of visual discrimination skills prior to reading instruction. Journal of Experimental Education , 1967, 3, 15-26.
13.
Samuels, S.J., Effect of distinctive feature training on paired-associate learning . Journal of Educational Psychology, 1973 , 64, 164-170.
14.
Sidman, M., Stoddard, L.T., The effectiveness of fading in programming a stimulus form discrimination for retarded children. Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1967, 10, 3-15.
15.
Sutherland, N.S., Mackintosh, N.J., Mechanisms of animal discrimination learning. New York : Academic Press, 1971.
16.
Zeaman, D., House, B.J., The role of attention in retardate discrimination learning. In N.R. Ellis (Ed.), Handbook of Mental Deficiency . New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. , 1963.