Previous research has reported that the effectiveness of special education in remediating learning difficulties varies as a function of the type of classroom placement, the student's age, and their intellectual ability. More recent findings have also suggested that a learning disability is not a single diagnostic entity, but rather distinct subtypes of learning disabled students exist. The study sought to determine if cluster analysis of the present sample yielded subtypes which conformed to previously identified LD subtypes; and whether these different subtypes of learning disabled (LD) students respond differentially in terms of the students academic achievement.The sample was comprised of 136 LD subjects between the ages of 9 and 15 years old for whom Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) data was available for both initial assessment, and re-assessment three years later.Initial comparisons of the sample were conducted by examining differences in academic achievement for the three subtests of the PIAT for two different types of educational placement: full time versus part time; by racial groups; and between pre and post test results. Three main effects were found in the initial MANOVA on the PIAT subtests of math and reading recognition, however, none of the statistically significant results were determined to be of practical significance. These statistical results were consistent with previous research findings.The sample was subtyped using cluster analysis. A three cluster solution was determined using three variables: intelligence, achievement, and age of the subject. The three subtypes were described and determined to be consistent with subtypes previously identified. Cluster 1 was dropped from further analysis as not conforming to an LD profile and because of sample size.A 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 MANOVA was performed: cluster membership by placement by race by pre-post test results. Cluster 2 students significantly declined in their reading recognition achievement over the three years they were in special education, while Cluster 3 students gained significantly in reading recognition achievement over the same time period.The present results suggest that school psychologist should carefully consider not only whether a student is learning disabled, but the nature and severity of the disability when recommending placement. / Department of Educational Psychology

The study examined the existence of (dis)similarities between subgroups of learning disabled children who had language-based learning disorders and those who did not exhibit specific language-based disabilities, and what related symptomatology characterized these children. The present study extends the previous literature by utilizing a multidimensional approach to the identification of language-based learning disordered children. The subjects used in this study were a group of 46 children between the ages of 6 and 14 years old referred to a major medical center for psychoeducational evaluation due to reported learning and/or behavioral difficulties. The subjects were separated into two groups according to the nature of the initial referral. Initial comparisons of the two groups were conducted by examining differences in cognitive, achievement, language, and behavioral functional as measured by standardized psychometric instruments. Significant differences were found between the two groups on several variables. Subtyping of the sample was accomplished using Ward's Method of cluster analysis. Fourteen cluster variables were chosen for analysis. These included (a) WISC-R Verbal IQ, (b) WISC-R Performance IQ, (c) PPVT, (d) VMI, (e) Reading, Spelling, and Arithmetic subtests of the WRAT-R, (f) the five language composites of the TOLD, and (g) the Parent and Teacher versions of the Conner's Abbreviated Questionnaire. Two separate cluster analyses, one with and one without behavioral data were calculated. Results of the second cluster analysis were similar to the first. To validate the obtained cluster solutions, Multivariate Analysis of Variance was used to examine whether the clusters differed significantly on a linear composite of cognitive, achievement, language, and behavioral instruments. The expected subgroupings of language-disordered children did not appear. Several theoretical explanations for these findings are discussed and implications for future research are offered. / Department of Educational Psychology

The number of elderly people around the world is growing rapidly. This has led to an increase in the number of people who are seeking assistance and adequate service either at home or in long-term- care institutions to successfully accomplish their daily activities. Responding to these needs has been a burden to the health care system in terms of labour and associated costs and has motivated research in developing alternative services using new technologies. Various intelligent, and non-intelligent, machines and robots have been developed to meet the needs of elderly and people with upper limb disabilities or dysfunctions in gaining independence in eating, which is one of the most frequent and time-consuming everyday tasks. However, in almost all cases, the proposed systems are designed only for the personal use of one individual and little effort to design a multiple-user feeding robot has been previously made. The feeding requirements of elderly in environments such as senior homes, where many elderly residents dine together at least three times per day, have not been extensively researched before. The aim of this research was to develop a machine to feed multiple elderly people based on their characteristics and feeding needs, as determined through observations at a nursing home. Observations of the elderly during meal times have revealed that almost 40% of the population was totally dependent on nurses or caregivers to be fed. Most of those remaining, suffered from hand tremors, joint pain or lack of hand muscle strength, which made utensil manipulation and coordination very difficult and the eating process both messy and lengthy. In addition, more than 43% of the elderly were very slow in eating because of chewing and swallowing problems and most of the rest were slow in scooping and directing utensils toward their mouths. Consequently, one nurse could only respond to a maximum of two diners simultaneously. In order to manage the needs of all elderly diners, they required the assistance of additional staff members. The limited time allocated for each meal and the daily progression of the seniors??? disabilities also made mealtime very challenging. Based on the caregivers??? opinion, many of the elderly in such environments can benefit from a machine capable of feeding multiple users simultaneously. Since eating is a slow procedure, the idle state of the robot during one user???s chewing and swallowing time can be allotted for feeding another person who is sitting at the same table. The observations and studies have resulted in the design of a food tray, and selection of an appropriate robot and applicable user interface. The proposed system uses a 6-DOF serial articulated robot in the center of a four-seat table along with a specifically designed food tray to feed one to four people. It employs a vision interface for food detection and recognition. Building the dynamic equations of the robotic system and simulation of the system were used to verify its dynamic behaviour before any prototyping and real-time testing.

This is an empirical study which a/ describes and evaluates the role of day centres with regard to young people with physical impairments aged between 16 and 30, b/ describes and evaluates the interactions between users and staff within the day centre environment, c/ outlines and assesses the level of user participation in the centres with reference to activities, the decision making process and control, and d/ suggests a set of policy recommendations which are applicable to both the service studied and day services generally for this user group. Four ideal types of day centre for the younger physically impaired are identified. All are criticised on the basis that they are inherently segregative, emphasize difference and perpetuate stigma. Within this context day centres are perceived as the 'dumping ground' for those people who are excluded, because of physical impairment, from the normal social and economic life of society. Empirical evidence to support this view is provided firstly by the overtly negative features of the general organization and admission policies of the system studied, secondly by the degree of social and economic disadvantage experienced by the users interviewed prior to day centre use, and thirdly by the manner in which they were similarly labelled and 'directed' toward the centres. I argue that day centre use reinforces disadvantage because a/ although helper/helped relations within the system are viewed positively by both users and staff, user participation and control of services is low and, b/ while the system provides a range of facilities which give many users a level of self determination unavailable in the community at large, its capacity to extend those experiences beyond the day centre boundary is limited to only a few. Consequently attendance for the majority will be long term. I list a number of recommendations, including the formulation of a national policy clarifying the role of day services for this user group, which might help to alleviate this problem. I conclude that present policies which successfully disable young people with impairments are no longer simply socially unacceptable. They are economically inept.

The value of measuring Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is the main concern of this thesis. The theory and research described in the thesis examines the psychological and educational purpose of measuring the ZPD within the context of children's representational skills. The first chapter discusses the development of children's ability to understand and use spatial representations. Recent research in developmental psychology is criticised for measuring the ZPD and claiming that the ZPD corresponds to children's individual developmental level. The experiments in Chapter 2 show that previous research has overestimated the representational ability of young children and that a children's potential development is different from their actual development, as assessed by the ZPD. Chapter 3 examines the origins of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and the ZPD within Soviet psychology and Hegelian philosophy. The next chapter presents contemporary interpretations of the ZPD which have to varying degrees attempted to extend this concept. The idea of dynamic assessment is introduced in this chapter and experiments using this notion are described in detail. Preliminary studies are described in Chapter 5, which examine the possible need for measurement of the ZPD and they also choose appropriate samples, methods and apparatus for future experiments which aim to measure the ZPD within a spatial task. The sixth chapter consists of three experimental studies, which all attempted to measure the ZPD using dynamic assessment techniques. These studies showed that measurement of the ZPD could provide important diagnostic information about children's spatial ability beyond that given by individual tests of intelligence. This was especially true in the case of children with learning difficulties. The results of all the experiments in the thesis are discussed in relation to measurement of the ZPD and its value within developmental psychology and educational psychology.

This thesis investigates two different approaches to improving access to the Web for visually impaired people: the design of Web content; and the presentation of content. The potential for improving the design of Web content was investigated in an evaluation of the usability of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative. Student Web page authors used the Guidelines to adapt Web pages containing various elements (such as images and tables). These pages were collated into a Web site, which was evaluated by visually impaired people. The page authors found it difficult to find the information they required in the Guidelines document, and had difficulties with implementing the advice of the guidelines. The visually impaired people who evaluated the pages found that the extent of the accessibility of the different elements varied depending on the individual’s experience of using the Web, and the software they used. The accessibility of some elements was not improved by the implementation of the guidelines. The potential for improving the presentation of Web content was investigated using a haptic device. The perception of virtual textures and objects by blind and sighted people via this device was examined. It was found that the virtual textures were perceived differently to the real textures examined in the literature, and that the blind people could better discriminate between the textures than the sighted people could. The virtual objects were explored from the inside and from the outside. It was found that objects generally felt larger from the inside than from the outside. This has been termed the ‘Tardis’ effect. The thesis concludes that it is difficult to define what we mean by ‘accessibility’. Without a clear definition it is not possible to judge whether a Web site is ‘truly’ accessible. The difficulties in making Web content fully accessible mean that additional methods are required for presenting the content in different ways. The researcher believes that haptic devices offer one such method, and could be particularly useful in presenting information that is visual in nature, such as information laid out in columns.

This thesis looks at social scientific and disability related research on visual impairment and education. It starts from a historical perspective, and outlines the radical change of emphasis in research and thinking brought about by the Disabled People's Movement. After showing how this movement has developed, it looks at various aspects of visual impairment, concentrating on rehabilitation, personality research and the symbolism of the eye. The next section looks at the development of education for visually impaired people. It starts from a historical perspective, and relates this to mainstream Sociological research on classroom interaction and school culture. All of these sections highlight the importance of attitudes and social factors, whilst not denying the undoubted impact of visual impairment in itself. 23 visually impaired school pupils were interviewed, each individually, in a wide range of schools, and from a variety of social and educational backgrounds although an age range of 14 to 18 years seemed most suitable, for various reasons, the ages of those interviewed range from 13 to 19 years. For more detail see Chapter 7. The results highlighted a lack of understanding amongst educational establishment and society at large, especially with regard to partial sight. They showed that generally people can live normal lives, but that it is difficult for them to become fully part of groups which include sighted people, mainly due to problems in sighted people's attitudes and the effects of not seeing who and what is around. Varying levels of confidence were found in both mainstream and special schools, and these often related to the level of encouragement given by staff for the visually impaired people to mix with sighted people. 10 sighted colleagues of the visually impaired respondents at three of the schools were also interviewed, again individually. They were aged 15 and 16. Again, see Chapter 7 for more details. They highlighted issues including looking different, not "knowing how to act" around a visually impaired person, and in some schools, a lack of information about visual impairment. It was these issues, along with the availability of more mainstream information for visually impaired people, (especially "top shelf" material) that concerned respondents the most.

In recent years, research with students identified as academically gifted has focused on what processes enable these students to perform at high levels of ability. The present study was carried out in the context of exploring the role of metacognition in giftedness. A specific focus of the study was whether learning-disabled gifted students performed more similarly to their gifted or nongifted peers (i.e., learning-disabled or average-achieving) on measures of metacognition. An interview was used to assess metacognitive knowledge in reading, and the error-detection paradigm was paired with the think-aloud method of data collection to investigate metacognitive skills in monitoring comprehension while reading a text. The dependent variables were an index of metacognitive knowledge, the percentage of metacognitive statements made, the number of errors detected, and a comprehension score. A measure of prior knowledge was used as a covariate. / The subjects were 48 boys, drawn equally from both the elementary and high school grade levels, who had been identified by their respective school systems as being gifted, learning-disabled gifted, average-achieving, or learning-disabled. The design incorporated two levels of giftedness (gifted or not gifted) and two levels of learning disability (learning-disabled or not learning-disabled) at two grade levels (elementary and high school). Results of the multivariate analysis of covariance revealed a main effect for giftedness, indicating that the subjects identified as gifted performed significantly better than did the nongifted subjects. This result, coupled with the lack of gifted-by-learning disabilities interaction, showed that the learning-disabled gifted subjects performed more like their gifted than their nongifted peers on the four dependent variables. There was also a main effect for grade, with the subjects at the high school level performing better on the dependent variables than the subjects in the elementary grade level. Finally, a grade-by-gifted interaction was revealed, which an examination of the univariate analyses of variance indicated was most likely due to a ceiling effect on the measures of metacognitive knowledge and comprehension. / These results support the hypotheses that giftedness is related to the use of metacognitive skills in a comprehension-monitoring task, and that the learning-disabled gifted subjects perform characteristically like their gifted peers with respect to their use of metacognitive knowledge and skills.

Since the time of Bryan's (1974) seminal work on the social status of children with learning disabilities (LD), research has consistently shown that children with LD struggle to earn social acceptance from non-LD peers. Recently, investigators have uncovered within-group variability among children with LD suggesting that some children with LD are well accepted and even popular among non-LD peers. An appeal in the field of learning disabilities has emerged, calling for a shift from deficit-model research focusing on the deficiencies of children with LD, to the investigation of how children with LD obtain positive social outcomes. Accordingly, a study was undertaken addressing this request by examining the characteristics of peer-accepted children with LD from a multi-rater and multi-method perspective. Using the comprehensive model of social competence proposed by Vaughn and Hogan (1990) as the theoretical framework, data were gathered from teachers, peers, and peer-accepted children with and without LD in important areas of social functioning. Participants were grade four and five mainstreamed students meeting the following criteria: (a) having a researcher-identified learning disability in at least one academic area (reading, spelling, or arithmetic) and (b) peer-rated social acceptance as determined via a modified version of the Asher and Dodge (1986) sociometric classification system. Statistical analyses consisted of multivariate and univariate techniques. Findings indicated few significant differences between peer-accepted children with and without LD in specific areas of social competence as rated by peers. Significant interactions, however, between LD status and gender revealing variable profiles of social-behavioural characteristics for boys and girls with and without LD did emerge from the perspective of teachers. Implications for special education referral and placement, inclusive education, and interventions are discussed.

The benefits and influences of parent involvement were examined among a group of children with learning disabilities (LD). One aim of this study was to determine whether different types of parent involvement are associated with educational benefits in special education. A second aim was to apply an existing model of parent involvement to assess its influences in this population. One hundred and twenty-three children with and without LD from grades 1 to 8 and their parents participated in the study. Children's grades and their attitudes to school were used as educational outcomes to evaluate the impact of their parents' involvement. Mothers and fathers completed questionnaires regarding their school, cognitive-intellectual and personal involvement, as well as measures of stress, social support, and perception of their child's academic ability. Mothers were consistently more involved than fathers in all types of activities. Higher grades were significantly correlated with mothers' involvement in school-related activities and fathers' involvement in personal activities. Fathers who felt they received a greater amount of social support tended to be more involved in their children's cognitive and personal activities. Mothers who perceived a greater amount of social support were more personally involved with their children, and mothers who perceived their children as having more severe LDs were less personally involved. Overall results extend the literature on the benefits and the factors associated with parent involvement for children with LD and highlight the need for parents, educators and school psychologists to combine resources in order to increase awareness and levels of parent involvement.