James E. Turnure

Sustained and Selective Attention in Children with Learning Disabilities

Sustained and selective attention of 30 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students with learning disabilities (LD) and 20 controls were compared. A continuous performance test (CPT) yielded no differences for students with LD and controls, suggesting similar ability for both groups in sustaining attention and inhibiting impulsive responding. Subjects with LD made more errors than controls on a selective attention task when letter distractors were adjacent to the target letter but not when they were distant, and more correct responses than controls when facilitating letters were adjacent to the target, suggesting that students with LD are less able to narrow the focus of their attention. Longer response times by students with LD indicate that they have slower information-processing skills than controls. Regrouping students according to teacher ratings for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) yielded the customary impulsive response set on the CPT and more errors on the selective attention task, but no differences on response times for students with ADHD. LD students with ADHD made more errors than LD students without ADHD when letter distractors were adjacent to the target letter.Sustained and selective attention of 30 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students with learning disabilities (LD) and 20 controls were compared. A continuous performance test (CPT) yielded no differences for students with LD and controls, suggesting similar ability for both groups in sustaining attention and inhibiting impulsive responding. Subjects with LD made more errors than controls on a selective attention task when letter distractors were adjacent to the target letter but not when they were distant, and more correct responses than controls when facilitating letters were adjacent to the target, suggesting that students with LD are less able to narrow the focus of their attention. Longer response times by students with LD indicate that they have slower information-processing skills than controls. Regrouping students according to teacher ratings for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) yielded the customary impulsive response set on the CPT and more errors on the selective attention task, b...

Communication and Cues in the Functional Cognition of the Mentally Retarded

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the social elements of selected learning situations, with the premise that it is in such circumstances that children acquire most of their knowledge and skills. The chapter analyzes learning in terms of the direct and indirect communicative events or acts involved in experimental procedures and instructions, relates this analysis to retention and transfer, discusses the concept of functional cognition; the chapter also discuss both general theoretical and applied issues pertaining to mental retardation. Emphasizing the social determination of cognitive development and postulating a communication process as the vehicle for this influence implies that the action of social agents is important in intellectual development, just as it is in the socialization process. The research orientation being advanced minimizes testing the broad outlines of stage theories, general developmental trends in cognitive functioning, and the like. Cognitive investigators are joining the intervention-oriented behavior modifiers that have previously represented the dominant systematic applied effort in the field of mental retardation.

Instruction and Cognitive Development: Coordinating Communication and Cues

A major new premise guiding much of contemporary cognitive instructional research is that the development of “cognition” is in many ways a social phenomenon. Therefore, the development of any higher mental process should be analyzed in terms of social influences on its expressions both in general experience and everyday life as well as in schools and experimental situations. The centrality of communication in social affairs indicates that insights into instruction and learning could emerge from research on language and communication, examples of which are provided.

Enriching children's recall of picture-dictionary definitions with interrogation and elaborated pictures

Preschool-age children were presented four picture-dictionary definitions to leam. Definitions were accompanied either by pictures detailing all the attributes of the definition referent (elaborated pictures) or simpler, less complete illustrations (nonelaborated pictures). After one presentation, the definition was repeated either as a series of questions to which the child responded, or as simple declarative restatements. Total recall of information stated in the definitions was improved by the elaborated pictures. The presence of elaborated pictures also resulted in greater recall congruent with the defined concept, but not present in the definition as stated (i.e., inferences). Questioning produced a higher percentage of paraphrased recall (i.e., nonverbatim recall of information stated in the definitions). These latter two findings are consistent with the interpretation that both elaborated pictures and questions lead preschoolers to process more extensively information provided in definitions.

Distractibility in the Mentally Retarded: Negative Evidence for an Orienting Inadequacy.

Three studies are described in which the orienting behavior of normal and mentally retarded children is investigated under a variety of conditions. An initial study found that, in many cases, the normal children showed nontask orientations to a greater extent than did the retarded children. An examination of those circumstances wherein the retarded had been found to glance more indicated that such circumstances, often observed in the classroom, are inappropriate for adjudging retarded children to be distractible. Further research involving only retarded subjects showed that the inclusion of an adult in the learning situation greatly increased the retarded childrens nontask orientations. However, it was also shown that if cues were provided by the adult they would be utilized by the subjects; the retarded childrens glancing apparently represented information seeking and not merely vacuous orientations to a salient social stimulus. A new conception of childrens attending behaviors was suggested to account for the findings.

Reactions to Physical and Social Distracters by Moderately Retarded Institutionalized Children

1Research supported in part by a grant from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota to the author. Preparation of this paper supported i n part by grant OE-09-332189-4533032 to the University of Minnesota Research and Development Center in Education of the Handicapped from the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, U.S. Office of Education. Deficiencies of attention have been attributed to the mentally retarded from at least the timeof Ribot (1890).Teachers often refer to these apparent deficiences as short attention span, inattention, or distractibility. The crux of the problem is that retarded students sometimes appear to show excessive non-orientation toward tasks which teachers consider important. The notion that the mentally retarded have short attention spans and are highly distractible appears to have developed out of early conceptualizations of the relation of attention to intelligence (cf. James, 1890; Ribot, 1890). Tests of attention span have been built into I Q tests, and incidental observations made by psychometricians in the course of I Q testing have tended to affirm and then to perpetuate convi c t ions of retardate distract i bi I i ty. Overgeneralizations from work with brain-damaged retarded (cf. Strauss & Lehtinen, 1947), whose special case is not considered here, may also contribute to the acceptance of the notion. However, hardly any controlled, systematic investigations of the orienting behaviors of the non-brain-damaged or “familial” retarded have been reported to substantiate assertions about their “distractibility,” much less studies including normal MA and CA comparison groups. A recent study by Turnure & Zigler (1964, Study 2) included a record of the number of times normal and retarded subjects glanced at the experimenter while performing several tasks. It was found that the retarded subjects glanced significantly more often than the normal subjects. This finding would seem to substantiate a hypothesis of greater distractibility among the retarded. However, the greater incidence of glancing by the retarded chil-

Long-Term Memory and Mental Retardation

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the historical development of the problem of studying retention in fast and slow learners. The chapter reviews the information on the long-term retention capabilities of persons with mental retardation. Evidence is accumulating that the long-term memory (LTM) capacity of young mildly handicapped individuals is intact and functions within normal ranges on an array of tasks. The growing appreciation of the extent of individual differences and the varieties of diagnostic subgroups among the mentally retarded population clearly indicates the need for more intense and subtle analyses of psychological processes, including studies of apparent neuropsychological concomitants among the severely retarded.

Social influences on cognitive strategies and cognitive development: The role of communication and instruction

Abstract Cognitive strategy training has been shown empirically to be extremely effective in enhancing learning and memory performance in retarded individuals. However, the theoretical status and applied utility of the strategy concept has been subjected to increasing criticism, particularly regarding the lack of definition and specificity in its use, when it is involved in instructional procedures applied to typical learning and information processing tasks. Extensions of research in language and communication provide a social basis for analyzing instruction, in terms of communication theory and pragmatics, and a possible approach to more general studies of the skills and strategies of information processing. The question arises whether rather disparate views of cognitive processing systems can be synthesized, or, by their mutual consideration, at least provide a basis for clearer articulation of research issues. A synthesis of prominent usages of the “strategic processing” construct derived from the social basis of communication theory is advanced.

Elaboration structure and list length effects on verbal elaboration phenomena

Abstract The effects of elaboration structure (Sentence, Semantic paragraph, Syntactic paragraph) and list length (8, 12, 16 pairs) on paired-associate learning were investigated in a 3 × 3 factorial design. Seventy-five educable retardates were tested on acquisition (S-R) and reversal (R-S) tasks. Significant acquisition differences were found in the 8-pair list, where Semantic paragraph Ss performed better than Sentence Ss. In the longer lists, all structures were equally effective in facilitating acquisition (mean first trial correct = 60%), as well as reversal (mean correct = 95%). Sentence form (declarative, imperative, interrogative) was controlled in each elaboration structure. Analyses indicated that significantly fewer acquisition errors were made on pairs presented in declarative and imperative, as opposed to interrogative, elaborations. Tests of recall for the elaborations revealed that Ss in all conditions generally recalled them as declarative sentences. Further observations at 24 pairs confirmed the 12- and 16-pair findings.

Vocabulary Development of Educable Retarded Children

This study represents an example of translating basic research on learning strategies into the development of classroom instruction. In particular, three approaches to vocabulary instruction were developed based on research from the training of elaboration strategies with retarded children. These approaches were tested with a month of vocabulary instruction presented daily to nine classes for the educable mentally retarded. Data related to vocabulary development and strategy usage indicated the instructional conditions were differentially affected. The findings provided initial guidelines as to how elaborations could be incorporated into classroom instruction for the mentally retarded.