William L. Goodwin

Cognitive behavior modification: ‘Motivated learning’ reading treatment with subprofessional therapy-technicians

Abstract A method of treating reading deficits based upon an extrinsic motivational system previously employed successfully with a single subject was extended to eighteen additional subjects. The junior-high age subjects included retarded children in special classes, several emotionally disturbed children, and culturally deprived children. The method of training used in the original study was designed to be simple to administer and simple to record the performance of the child. Thus, it was hypothesized that subprofessional personnel could be employed to administer the treatment. Adult volunteers and high school seniors were used as the therapy-technicians. The eighteen Ss were given 38.2 hr of training in daily half-hour sessions, during which period the average reinforcement earned was

A Study of the Elementary-School Teaching Team

22.29. The mean number of single word reading responses was 94,425. The rate of reading accelerated over the period of training even though the reading material became more difficult. This occurred during a period when progressively less (about one-fourth as much) reinforcement was given per reading response. A mean of 593.5 new words were learned and 70.9 per cent of these were retained in a long-term test. The attention, attendance, cooperation, and diligent work behavior of the various children were maintained in good strength throughout the duration of the study. The results suggest that research be conducted to develop methods for treatment of behavioral deficits that can be widely applied by subprofessional therapy-technicians supervised by clinical psychologists.

Effect of Three Methods of Instruction upon the Handwriting Performance of Third and Fourth Graders1

the report prepared for the Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (2). This article reviews the organizational design of the study, describes the hierarchical arrangement in the team, considers a controlled study of pupil discipline (relating it to the nature of the team structure), and briefly discusses suggestions to improve team-teaching organizations. De ign Two elementary schools in Madison, Wisconsin, provided the pupils for this study. The schools served primarily the lower socioeconomic families in the city. About 25 per cent of the families were receiving funds under the public assistance program; 60 to 70 per cent of the fathers were employed in unskilled or semiskilled occupations. Three organizations that together enrolled about 350 pupils were involved in the study. Two of these organizations were the team and the self-contained organizations in Washington School, which housed about 60 per cent of the pupils in the study. The third organization was the self-contained organization in Longfellow School, which enrolled the remaining 40 per cent of the subjects. Since the project ran for two years, the exact

Learning and human abilities : educational psychology

One of the interesting generalizations arising from a national survey of practices in the teaching of handwriting (Herrick & Okada, 1963) was that although most respondents claimed to favor the teaching of handwriting in all subject areas, few reported attempts to help pupils develop a personal style or recognize their own errors. This is true even though (a) relatively few types of errors account for a great proportion of the illegibilities in handwriting (Newland, 1932; Quant, 1946), and (b) commercial materials reflect consensus that in the upper elementary grades instructional time in handwriting may best be devoted to remedial work, i.e. identifying general and specific inaccuracies in letter forms, slant, size, spacing and alignment (Committee for Research in Basic Skills, 1960). The gap between an apparent need and actual prac-