Mavis Donahue

Learning Disabled Children's Attributions for Success and Failure.

These studies examined underachieving and control childrens beliefs about the causes of their successes and failures. In Study 1, third- through eighth-grade children were administered a scale measuring locus of control in achievement situations. Results indicated that underachieving children had weaker feelings of internal control over success than the control children. In Study 2, first- through eighth-grade children rated the importance of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck for success and failure in reading, on puzzles, and in social situations. The childrens ratings indicated that underachievers believed lack of effort played less of a role in their failures than did control children. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the achievement behavior of learning disabled children.

Learning Disabled Children's Peer Interactions during a Small-Group Problem-Solving Task.

Learning disabled children in grades three through eight participated in a problem-solving task requiring group decision making. An analysis of group choices indicated that the independently made choices of learning disabled children were less likely to be among the groups final choices. Analyses of the childrens communication patterns revealed that learning disabled children were less likely to disagree with classmates, less likely to try to argue for their choices, and more likely to agree with their peers. In addition, learning disabled children were found to be less likely to engage in “conversational housekeeping” than nondisabled children. Hence, learning disabled children were less persuasive than nondisabled children, apparently as a result of their assuming a submissive, deferential role when interacting with small groups of peers.

Learning Disabled Children's Conversational Skills--The "TV Talk Show.".

This study examined the conversational competence of learning disabled children when placed in a dominant social position. Learning disabled and nondisabled children were videotaped as they played the role of a talk show host interviewing a nondisabled child. The conversational strategies of the learning disabled and nondisabled children were analyzed for discourse and turn-taking behaviors. The results indicated that although the learning disabled children were cooperative conversational partners, their strategies for initiating and sustaining the interaction differed from those of nondisabled children. Learning disabled children asked fewer questions and were less likely to produce open-ended questions than nondisabled children. In turn, their conversational partners were less likely to provide elaborative responses to their questions. The results are discussed in terms of current hypotheses about learning disabled childrens linguistic deficits and their difficulties in establishing positive peer relations.

Phonological constraints on the emergence of two-word utterances.

Considerable interest has been generated concerning linguistic and cognitive factors influencing the onset of early combinatorial speech. The present diary study provides evidence that, for some children, the transition between the single-word and two-word stages may be governed by phonological constraints. The presence of a phonological selection strategy and consonant harmony rule in one childs developing phonological system is described. Evidence is presented suggesting that this consonant harmony constraint operated across morpheme boundaries. This had the effect not only of delaying the onset of two-word utterances, but also of influencing the selection of words that could occur in word combinations. The implications of these findings for explaining individual variation in the transition from single-word to combinatorial speech are discussed.

Conversational skills and modeling in learning disabled boys

Learning disabled (LD) children in the role of interviewer have been found to be less skilled than nondisabled children at initiating and sustaining a dialogue with a classmate. This study tested the effects of modeling on these conversational skills and on metaconversational knowledge. LD and nondisabled boys in grades 2 through 8 listened to either a dialogue of a child interviewer modeling open-ended questions, conversational devices and contingent comments and responses, or a monologue presenting only the interviewees responses. Each subject was then videotaped interviewing a classmate. Although the dialogue model increased LD childrens production of open-ended questions and comments, these strategies appeared more difficult for their listeners to understand and expand. Results of the metaconversational responses suggest that LD children are aware of their difficulties in conversational interaction.

Implications of the Learning Disabilities Definition for the Regular Education Initiative

This paper reviews the implications of definitions of learning disabilities for the Regular Education Initiative. The review finds that each definition includes reference to minimal brain dysfunction and assumes that children so labeled would show heterogeneous problems. While it is clear that professionals in the field intend for this category to describe children whose learning and behavioral problems are the result of central nervous system involvement, it is also clear that we lack the technology to verify the nature of such involvement. At the same time, however, an empirical data base is being established showing that learning disabled persons differ from normally achieving individuals on brain-related information processes delineated in the definition (e.g., working memory, learning complex rule systems, metacognition). We propose that this heterogeneity (i.e., “developmental imbalances, intraindividual gaps”) makes it unlikely that classroom modifications alone, regardless of a teachers pedagogical skill, will suffice to meet the complex needs of this population of children. Reflections upon the interface between the complexities of learning disabilities and the dynamics of the classroom environment suggest that there is a great deal more to be learned before we can replace special services by the Regular Education Initiative.

Studying Social Development and Learning Disabilities Is Not for the Faint-Hearted: Comments on the Risk/Resilience Framework.

Studying social dimensions of learning disabilities is not for the faint-hearted, in light of the multiple and interactive characteristics of these students and their social/cultural environments. Given the allure of the risk/resilience lens to make sense of these complexities, it would be easy to embrace these concepts too hastily. Four questions seem particularly important: What do we mean by risk and resilience factors? How do we characterize learning disabilities as risk factors?“At risk” for what? How should this framework guide intervention efforts? Rigorous thinking about these issues may enhance the promise of risk/resilience models for future research on social development.

Conversational Maxims and Scaffolded Learning in Children with Learning Disabilities Is the Flying Buttress a Better Metaphor

In our commentary on Stones (this issue) article on the metaphor of “scaffolding,” we propose (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) the “flying buttress” as an improvement. Unlike a scaffold, the buttress symbolizes a nontemporary architectural device that begins as a support to building new knowledge on an existing foundation, but then itself becomes an integral and evolving part of the new structure. We then analyze scaffolded instruction as a kind of conversation that depends on rather sophisticated shared assumptions about the agenda and the rules underlying the process of the conversation, including an understanding of when these rules are suspended. We present evidence that some children with language/learning disabilities may not benefit from scaffolded instruction because they (a) follow a different agenda during instructional discourse (e.g., to camouflage their lack of comprehension); and (b) overrely on the default Gricean Maxims that cooperative speakers always make an effort to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear.

The development of tact: Children's strategies for delivering bad news

Abstract Developmental and individual differences in tactfulness were assessed on a role-playing task requiring children to give negative feedback to peers. Subjects were learning disabled and nondisabled children in the first through fourth grades. Analyses indicated that third and fourth graders were more tactful than first and second graders, and that nondisabled children were more tactful than learning disabled children. The implications of these findings for childrens peer relationships are discussed.

Peer Relationships and Learning Disabilities

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the nature of peer relationships of students with learning disabilities, with an emphasis on research conducted during the past several years. Socio-metric research brought attention to the peer relationships of students with learning disabilities by showing that these children often were generally less liked or accepted by their classmates than other children. Overall, the results suggest that the majority of children with learning disabilities have at least one reciprocal friend, at least by the end of the school year. The quality of childrens friendships has been found to vary in such features as closeness, security, and conflict. Specifically, students without learning disabilities perceived higher levels of intimacy and support for self-esteem in their friendships than did the students with learning disabilities. When looking at the position of students with mild disabilities in the groups high in problem behavior, the students with mild disabilities tended to have lower centrality scores than the general education students, but the difference was not quite significant. Regardless of the measures used to assess peer relationships, there is remarkable consistency in the research evidence that students with learning disabilities are vulnerable to social difficulties. One potential explanation for emergence of the social difficulties of students with learning is that they are simply less interested in developing relationships with their peers.