Little research has been done on direct observation of retarded children in ongoing classroom situations, despite the fact that it can provide data on social or academic characteristics which are often quite different from those obtained by indirect measures such as teacher ratings or psychometrics. In the present study, over 900 children were observed in different classroom settings with regard to verbal interaction, attending, nonattending, and disruptive behavior. These were further broken into 3 conditions in which either peers or teachers were involved or where no observable response to the behavior was noticed. While total on-task behavior distinguished institutionalized children from children in community schools and special classes, it did not differentiate retarded children in community-based classrooms from one another. While some unexpected patterns of behavior emerged in each group, these generally tended to disappear when within-group classroom differences were taken into account. Some developmental trends were also observed. Surprisingly, overall levels of on-task behavior compared favorably with those found in previous observation studies of normal children.
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