The authors analyzed the results of a social validation survey to determine if autism service providers including special education teachers, parents, and administrators demonstrate a preference for the intervention components of Applied Behavior Analysis or Training and Education of Autistic and other Communication Handicapped Children. They also investigated the comprehensiveness of these tre...

Self-estimates of intelligence (SEI), which influence to what extent people engage in and how well they perform at a task, are subject to distortion. Here, the distortion effects of individual differences in intelligence (IQ), gender, and proximal (with reference to test performance) and distal (with reference to IQ score distributions) assessments of SEI were tested in a sample of 200 British ...

Expert educators continuously evaluate their students’ performance, adapting instructional programs to be as effective as possible for each child. This paper considers the information educators need to make these adaptations. The term educator refers here to professionals along the whole cascade of teaching services, from general classroom teachers, to learning specialists in smaller reading or...

BACKGROUND Individuals with disabilities experience higher rates of abuse than the nondisabled. Few evidence-based prevention interventions have been published despite a need for such work. This study evaluated IMPACT Ability, a safety and self-advocacy training for individuals with cognitive and/or physical disabilities. METHODS A quasi-experimental design was used to assess change in safe...

Panorama(BBC1 March 23) did nothing to dispel the myths and fears that surround Ashworth, Broadmoor and Rampton special hospitals. Neither Ashworth nor Broadmoor had an opportunity to put their case on the programme, maybe because they disagreed with what the programme was trying to establish.

Student performance in mathematics has been linked to the mathematical knowledge of the teacher. Based on this finding, a 5-day professional development module was created to improve teachers’ mathematical knowledge and their understanding of number sense. We found no difference prior to the professional development in mathematical content knowledge for teaching mathematics (CKTM) between speci...

The aim of this study was to explore the potential of ZORA robot-based interventions in rehabilitation and special education for children with severe physical disabilities. A two-centre explorative pilot study was carried out over a 2.5-month period involving children with severe physical disabilities with a developmental age ranging from 2 to 8 years. Children participated in six sessions with...

The purpose of this study was to further evaluate the outcomes of a model program that was designed to train current teachers of children with autism. Nine certified special education teachers participating in an intensive 5-day summer training program were taught a relatively large number of specific skills in two areas (preference assessment and direct teaching). The teachers met the mastery ...

Thinkers sympathetic to the autonomy of the special sciences – and emergentists in particular – typically think, not only that the special sciences are not reducible to the fundamental physical level, but also that the properties studied by the special sciences have causal powers of their own. More physicalistically inclined philosophers forcefully attack the latter idea. Their master argument ...

Special science generalizations admit of exceptions. Among the class of nonexceptionless special science generalizations, I distinguish (what I will call) minutis rectis (mr) generalizations from the more familiar category of ceteris paribus (cp) generalizations. I argue that the challenges involved in showing that mr generalizations can play the law role are underappreciated, and quite differe...