Michael M. Gerber

Peer Tutoring in Academic Settings

In the early years of the nineteenth century, before public education existed, Joseph Lancaster founded a school for working-class children in London (Kaestle, 1973; Lancaster, 1803). Lancaster’s belief that basic education would discipline and morally shape working-class children, together with his dislike for corporal punishment, attracted some financial supporters and hundreds of children. Faced with severe economic constraints, Lancaster devised a system of peer-mediated instruction which had immediate and dramatic international impact upon educational practice (Charconnet, 1975; Kaestle, 1975; Reigert, 1916/1969).

Microcomputer Use within Micro-Educational Environments:

An observational study of micro-educational environments (MEEs) and microcomputer use within these environments was conducted across a broad-based, representative sample of special day class, resource room, and mainstream classrooms in Southern California. Mildly handicapped students in special education settings were found to have less variety to their instructional experiences than did either handicapped or nonhandicapped students in the mainstream. That is, students in special education classes evidenced a more dominant pattern of individual, in-classroom, remedial work than did either handicapped or nonhandicapped students in the mainstream. Across all settings, students were highly engaged with the computer, although teachers spent little direct contact time with students during these periods. Microcomputer instruction emerges as a highly motivating vehicle for imparting information, but the effectiveness of these experiences remains to be assessed.

Educating All Children: Ten Years Later

This article reviews the Tenth Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of The Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA), covering the 1986–1987 school year. In addition to reporting the current status of services (i.e., numbers of students served, their placement, resources allocated and needed for their support), the report also discusses and cites data pertinent to (a) transition from secondary education: (b) state and federal efforts anticipating full implementation of preschool special education services under Public Law 99–457; and (c) the classification of students with learning disabilities. Some directions for research on special education at a national level are suggested.

Postmodernism in Special Education

As a basis for policy, constructivism has an ideological character that draws from but is not identical to Piagetian or Vygotskian notions of constructed knowledge. Special educators should be wary of borrowing fashionable rhetoric of postmodernism to justify development or reform of instruction and curriculum unless accompanying constructs and values can first be disentangled. In reflecting on the articles in this special issue, I indicate that there are higher stakes for special education, particularly in national curriculum and testing reform, that accompany constructivism as a rationale or framework for development of instructional curricular strategies for students with disabilities.

Techniques to teach Generalizable Spelling Skills

An imitation, modeling, and time-to learn spelling procedure may be effective for remedial purposes in classrooms.

An Appreciation of Learning Disabilities: The Value of Blue-Green Algae

In this article, I argue that creation of learning disability (LD) has served scientific, if not always policy, purposes. Debate over classification of natural variation is normal. Consensus on the mere existence of LD unleashed a beneficial search for better understanding of individual differences. Forty years of research may not have resolved all important problems, but it has produced inventive, creative tools that benefit both investigation and intervention and has discredited earlier beliefs about LD. Possibly, we are now on the threshold of understanding the complexity of LD development, natural history, and expression in schools.

Research and Practice in Teaching Spelling

An overview of the special spelling section presented in this issue of Academic Therapy