Education, Special

The problem investigated in this study was to determine the significance of agreement between the perceptions of parents and speech/language pathologists toward selected social competency needs of speech/language impaired children in the personal, family, and school contexts. Preschool children exhibiting speech/language impairments are more likely to demonstrate a lack of social competency development than children with normal speech and language development. As children with speech/language impairments receive intervention in the absence of parental support, the intervention results may be minimized. If perceptions of parents and speech/language pathologists differ significantly, parents may not reinforce carryover activities in the home, thereby reducing therapy gains. The evaluation instrument utilized in this study was a 31-item survey developed by Tunstall (1993) at the College of Education, University of South Carolina. The survey was created using a 4-point Likert-type scale. Reliability was obtained by Tunstall in 1993 and revealed good internal reliabilities. In 1996, this study included the entire sample of 100 respondents to obtain a high reliability coefficient alpha of .9189. The sample included 70 parents of preschool speech/language impaired students and 30 speech/language pathologists of the Broward County Public School System in Florida, during the fall of 1996. Surveys were distributed to parents of children exhibiting a speech/language impairment, who attended a preschool speech/language, developmental, and hearing screening provided by the Broward County Public Schools. During an annual Speech/Language Policies and Procedures meeting in August of 1996, surveys were distributed to 30 speech/language pathologists providing treatment for preschool children. Three hypotheses were developed to determine if there was a significant difference in the perceptions of the two groups surveyed. Analyses of variance were utilized to test the statistical significance of the group (parents and speech/language pathologists) differences for each factor (personal, family, and school). Descriptive statistics were included to describe the demographic characteristics of the respondents from the survey instrument. A Boneferonni type adjustment was made to the nominal alpha of .05, such that all the hypotheses were tested at the .017 level. Based on the findings of this study, there was a significant difference between the perceptions of the parents and speech/language pathologists toward selected social competency needs of preschool children with speech/language impairments within the family context, F(1,98) = 7.44, p =.0078. The results revealed the two groups were not in agreement as to the importance of family factors and the contributions of those factors to a preschool child's social competency. The mean score of the parents' responses was significantly higher than that of the speech/language pathologists.

This research explored group differences according to giftedness and achievement in the acquisition and generalization of a strategy for solving analogies. A distinction was made between proximal and distal transfer, with the latter expected to differentiate between gifted and nongifted cognition. Underachievement in gifted children was expected to reflect either strategy deficits, or the absence of performance differences in a theoretically important cognitive skill (generalization) between the so-called "underachieving" gifted and other bright but nongifted children. 162 seventh and eighth graders were selected according to intelligence and achievement scores, academic program, and teacher opinion, and assigned to one of four groups: high achieving gifted, underachieving gifted, high achieving nongifted, and average achieving nongifted. Each child was seen individually for two sessions, and solved a total of five sets of ten multiple-choice analogies. The first session included two baseline trials (one verbal and one figural set), followed by training in the use of a strategy. The second session included a proximal transfer trial (same analogy type as used at training), and a distal transfer trial (analogies from the never-trained domain). All analogies were solved orally, and strategy use was determined from audio-recordings. The results showed that the high achieving gifted children were more spontaneously, frequently, and successfully strategic than the other three groups, as well as most accurate following the decision not to use a strategy. They were also the only group to show performance increases at distal transfer. In terms of gifted underachievement, there was evidence to support both hypotheses. The underachieving gifted children showed qualitative deficits in strategic functioning as compared to their high achieving gifted counterparts, and also tended to "look" like the high achieving nongifted group in their patterns of performance. These results were discussed in terms of the likelihood of subgroups of underachieving gifted children, and their implications for education and the identification of giftedness.

Individuals with nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD) have an impaired ability to interpret facial expressions of emotion (FEE), the consequences of which can include progressively debilitating socioemotional disturbances. Thus, it is important to determine how the neuroanatomical structures underlying the perception of FEE in people with NLD differ from the normal population. To this end, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare brain activation patterns in male and female adolescent subjects and male adult subjects with and without NLD. The subjects were presented with FEE at low and high intensities while they performed a gender decision task. Subjects with NLD displayed less activation in limbic areas responsible for processing emotion in the normal population. The NLD subjects exhibited more activity than controls in the orbital gyrus, inferior, middle and superior frontal gyri, fusiform and superior temporal gyri, insula, striatum and inferior and superior parietal lobules. Several of these structures participate in language function: as individuals with NLD have superior verbal abilities, it is probable that this population relies on their linguistic strengths to compensate for their nonverbal weaknesses whilst processing FEE. Additionally, because of an impaired capacity for attention to and discrimination of visual details, the NLD subjects showed more active responses for low intensity FEE in comparison to controls. This may have led to a failure of regions such as the middle and superior frontal and superior temporal gyri to habituate or sensitize appropriately to emotionally salient visual stimuli. In comparison with the normal population, people with NLD utilize different neural structures when processing FEE, in accordance with the strengths and deficits associated with the NLD syndrome.