Intervention in School and Clinic

Students with high-incidence disabilities (e.g., specific learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, mild mental retardation) can benefit from using bibliotherapy by learning how to become proactive problem solvers. Often students with high-incidence disabilities are characterized as inefficient in recognizing and solving problems. By learning a problem-solving strategy and applying it to children's literature titles, students with disabilities can learn to become independent and effective problem solvers.

Assessment, particularly standardized testing, is a hot topic in education today. Regardless of current fads, most classroom teachers have a need for objective tests—tests written by the teacher to assess student learning of specific objectives. Writing a good test is not easy, but by following the guidelines presented in this article, teachers can write better test items and, hence, evaluate student learning better.

In this article we demonstrate how to improve students' learning motivation by means of an attributional dialogue between teachers and students. The change in motivation is reflected in students' learning to attribute their achievements to their own educational efforts and to the use of appropriate learning strategies. The article exemplifies this procedure with dialogue pages of a typically achieving learner and a student with learning disabilities.

Children with minimal hearing loss are often not identified, and the educational implications of their hearing disability are unrealized. Because children with special learning problems have been shown to have a higher incidence of hearing loss than typical learners (Flexer, Millin, & Brown, 1990), special educators should be particularly aware of this significant issue. The purpose of this article is to clarify what is meant by minimal hearing loss (MHL), to summarize issues associated with MHL, and to describe instructional modifications for children with MHL.

Essential and often missing pieces of the functional assessment process are cultural perspectives and an assessment of their impact on behavior. This article addresses these missing pieces by providing guidelines for conducting culturally sensitive functional assessments: forming a diverse multidisciplinary team, employing culturally sensitive ways of selecting and defining target behavior, collecting information about students and their behaviors, analyzing data and formulating hypothesis statements, and developing culturally responsive behavioral intervention plans and evaluating their impact on students' cultural perspectives.