Joseph J. Stowitschek

Instigating Fundamental Change through Experiential Inservice Development.

In this article, we call for a rethinking of inservice education for teachers of children with disabilities as well as an investment in experiential modes of teacher renewal. We present examples of two applications of short-term internships where teachers are immersed in the successful use of exemplary practices by host teachers in early education and school-to-adult life transition settings. We conclude with a description of the implications of these experiential approaches for promoting systemic change and for the redesign of inservice education formats.

Intensive Inservice Teacher Education and Concomitant Changes in Handicapped Learners.

When the article was written, Joseph J. Stowitschek was Associate Professor, George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, Tennessee. He is now at the Exceptional Child Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. Inservice teacher education has received increased attention in recent years, partially as a result of an increase in the teacher pool (Gall, 1977), and partially as a result of the passage of the Education for P~li Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (P.L. 94-142). A surplus of teachers in the field has specifically resulted in several conditions which demand an in-

Training institutionalized, elderly mentally retarded persons as intervention agents for socially isolate peers

Abstract In this study each of two elderly mentally retarded women were taught to engage two withdrawn peers in appropriate social interaction. Three training techniques—minimal instructions, role playing, direct prompting—were evaluated in a combined multiple baseline and reversal design. The study was concerned also with the systematic fading of role playing and prompting procedures and the assessment of social behavior changes across time in nontreatment (generalization) setting. The results showed that: (a) both peer change agents effectively altered the social behavior of their designated target subject; (b) the three training procedures produced differential results across change agent-target person dyads; (c) both role playing and prompting techniques were faded successfully; and (d) none of the training techniques produced generalized behavior change.

Evaluating Handwriting Performance: The Student Helps the Teacher

counselor, and then research assistant in the Office of Education Evaluation, all in the city of New York school system. He received his BA degree in philosophy from Syracuse University and his MA degree in secondary education as well as his MS degree in guidance from the City University of New York. He received his doctoral degree in applied human development and has done postdoctoral work in special education administration at Teachers College of Columbia University. Requests for reprints should be ad-

Applying Programming Principles to Remedial Handwriting Practice

The use of a validation research strategy applied to the evaluation of a remedial handwriting instruction package is described The main feature of the package is a programming procedure used to adapt conventional worksheets and workbook pages that emphasize repetitive practice on manuscript letter formation. The main feature of the evaluation is that teachers in classes for learning disabled children used the package entirely under their own direction and under the prevailing classroom conditions. Thirty-four children and eleven teachers participated in the study which employed a pretest/posttest control group design. Results indicated that although teachers did not use the package as consistently or extensively as it had been used by the experimenters in a laboratory setting, they did achieve an acceptable rate of improvement in the manuscript letter formation performance of their students. These findings support the premise of validation researchers that results obtained on an instruction procedure or program when used under more or less laboratory conditions can not necessarily be expected to generalize to field conditions and that field evaluation must, as closely as possible, approximate projected condtions of use following dissemination.

Media Technology: Exploring Applications and Innovations for Severely Handicapped Students, Fourth Annual Symposium Proceedings.

This paper addresses the critical relationship between instructional materials, educational programs, and the acquisition of chronological, age-appropriate and functional skills by severely handicapped students in natural environments.This paper addresses the critical relationship between instructional materials, educational programs, and the acquisition of chronological, age-appropriate and functional skills by severely handicapped students in natural environments.