Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities

Recent research on social reinforcement is examined for implications for educational practice. Affective and informative values of reinforcing events are examined. Some guidelines for practice are beginning to emerge that suggest the importance of clearly differentiating between the uses of approbation to sustain performance and the uses of systematic feedback in the specifics of learning tasks.

Data from a current longitudinal study are utilized to determine mental ages of achievement for 21 Piagetian reasoning measures. Limitation due to sample size (75 normal, IQ 90-110; 75 retarded children, IQ 50-75) and age range (CA 6-20) make the study an exploratory one; however, findings serve to indicate the relationships between Piagetian stages and mental ages.

This article analyzes many of the problems and programs associated with the sex education of the mentally retarded. Specific problems faced by retarded children, their parents, and their teachers as well as specific programs of sex education are critically evaluated. The analysis of the literature reveals that most of it presents theorizations rather than scientific data and is concerned with adolescents rather than younger children. Recommendations are made for future research.

The adaptation of the traditional vocational education instructional approach to business skills is reviewed. The project, operating in a residential college facility, indicates that mentally retarded students can learn duplicator machine operation, typing, and basic filing in the same manner as normal peers. Tested intelligence or reading scores do not seem to be correlated to ability of educable mentally retarded girls to learn basic vocational business skills.

What factors does a consumer need to consider, faced with a confusing diversity of instructional materials which are often promoted as panaceas for learning problems? Do producers’ claims of effectiveness provide adequate information by which to judge a material in comparison with other products? The authors propose several important guidelines for selecting math manipulative devices, in light of individual developmental levels, handicapping conditions, and specific instructional objectives. Specific factors are discussed under broader considerations of sensory dimensions, structure, cost, and content.

One of the frequent criticisms of graduate programs in special education is that they often do not provide adequate practicum experiences for the students. It is imperative that prospective college teachers and administrators be provided with an opporutnity to apply the wealth of information they have accumulated in a practical situation. The following article describes a program which includes an internship as part of its requirement, and explains what actually occures during the course of a typical intership experience.

A new and comprehensive arithmetic curriculum for mentally handicapped students is under development by Dr. John Cawley at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Now in its third year the project “A Program Project Research and Demonstration Effort in Arithmetic Among the Mentally Handicapped” has been funded for a five year period by the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped. Working with Dr. Cawley on the project are Dr. Vincent Glennon, Dr. Henry A. Goodstein, and graduate assistants from the special education department of the university.

Tailored to the needs of mentally handicapped students, the curriculum is uniquely different from traditional arithmetic programs. Nearly 11,000 units of instruction provide the teacher and student with sufficient material to overcome the fixed frequency problem of other arithmetic programs. In a fixed frequency curriculum, there is a fixed number of pages or problems in each topic area, not allowing for individual learning differences. The multiple option curriculum provides a massive number of lessons in each topic area from which the teacher can select activities providing for full mastery through sufficient experiences in original learning, overlearning, recall, and application.

In sharp contrast to programs which focus on computational activities, Dr. Cawley's program is built upon cognitive or thinking activities designed to develop concepts and principles. Problem solving activities utilize verbal information requiring thought rather than automatic computation. Also built into the program are group activities which teach social responsibility as well as arithmetic concepts.

Various components of the instructional materials can be controlled to meet the learning needs of each child. For example, in verbal problem solving, complexity of three components-vocabulary, sentence length and structure, and arithmetic content-can be varied independently of each other. By increasing the complexity of one component, while holding the other two constant, the teacher is able to diagnose difficulties in learning. More traditional programs increase the complexity of syntactical, semantic, and arithmetical components simultaneously.

In the following interview, Dr. John Cawley talks about the unique nature of his curriculum, innovative teaching techniques, and some newly developed instructional materials.