published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The purpose of this study was to identify team development activities which occurred in public elementary schools during the implementation year of the Teacher Assistance Team (TAT) and determine if there were any significant differences between highly effective and less effective teams. The sample under study consisted of 42 elementary schools which were implementing the Teacher Assistance Team model during the 1983-84 school year. A questionnaire survey instrument was used to obtain information from the schools regarding team development activities. School staff were asked to respond to eight general areas thought to impact upon the adoption of the Teacher Assistance Team model in the school. These areas were level of service delivered, effectiveness of service delivered, personnel training, team membership, scheduling of meetings, principals' support strategies, technical assistance needs, and teacher reactions to the team process. Statistical analysis revealed the high and low service teams did not differ significantly in school enrollment, personnel trained, scheduling of team meetings, or 26 of the 27 support strategies employed by building principals. However, the analysis indicated significant differences between the high and low service levels. The high service teams operated for a larger proportion of the months possible; served a larger proportion of the student enrollment; and considered more cases per month and per team than did the low service teams. Additionally, the high service teams attempted to resolve a larger proportion of team development problems and actually resolved more problems than the low service teams. Building principals among the high service teams demonstrated more of a commitment to the team process by personally selecting team members and requiring that teachers experiencing learning or behavior problems in the classroom refer to the team for assistance. The results of this study hold implications for teachers and school administrators. Recommendations were developed enabling state and local educational agency personnel and building principals to increase the effectiveness of Teacher Assistance teams during the first year of the team's operation in the school. Future research is directed to address three outcomes of the team process. These are: referral and cost effectiveness; classroom intervention; and teacher satisfaction.

Interactive teaching approaches have been documented as viable and effective methods of comprehension instruction. This study identified the components characteristic of interactive and directive teaching. The language employed by teachers and learning disabled (LD) students engaged in one of three interactive strategies or a directive strategy are described and compared with student performance. A written summary and a multiple choice comprehension test served as dependent measures. Subjects were upper elementary bilingual, LD students and their teachers in eight self contained or resource classrooms. Classes were randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions: (a) semantic mapping, (b) semantic feature analysis, (c) semantic syntactic feature analysis, or (d) direct instruction. Teacher utterances were coded according to general, directive, and interactive teaching functions. Student utterances were coded according to prior knowledge categories including elaborate, specific, restrictive, and response, and other. Results reported indicate findings regarding classroom interaction, condition effects, and theoretical tenets. Teacher and student interaction patterns revealed (a) no difference in the amount of teacher talk across assigned conditions, (b) "no response" as the most frequent student response to teacher utterances, and (c) the most student to student conversation occurred in the semantic feature analysis and the semantic syntactic feature analysis condition. Condition effect findings reported significant difference on prior knowledge and cohesiveness of written summaries. Student performance on the multiple choice test exhibited no significant difference on vocabulary items. Theoretical divergence was represented by interactive and directive teaching functions that were most differently used. These differences characterize interactive and directive instruction. Findings indicate that learning disabled students are capable of benefiting from interactive instruction; and, teachers engaged in interactive instruction employ teaching functions that encouraged student participation in classroom discussion.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive tempo of learning disabled students and their listening comprehension ability as a function of rate of presentation, regardless of material content (i.e., taped narrative materials--leisure: high interest/low vocabulary; taped expository materials--factual/social studies and technical/science. These data were collected on 57 learning disabled students enrolled in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in the Anderson Community Schools Special Education Co-op. Each student was tested with the Matching Familiar Figures Test (Kagan et al., 1964). Three groups of the four cognitive tempo quadrants were utilized in the experimental manipulation (i.e., listening comprehension as a function of rate of presentation, regardless of material content). Fifteen subjects were randomly assigned within each group using a drawing with replacement procedure.A 3 x 3 x 4 analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducive to the manipulation of three independent variables with repeated measures on the latter two of these variables (i.e., material content and rate of presentation). One between groups analysis (3x) and two within groups analysis (3 x 4) were involved. A R<.05 significance level and error analysis wereemployed to test three null hypotheses.FindingsResults indicated that no significant differences existed between the three groups of subjects (i.e., impulsive, reflective, fast/accurate). However, significant differences existed between content levels and between the four rates of presentation. A significant interaction between groups and rates of presentation was observed. An analysis of simple effects revealed that significant differences existed for reflectives with respect to content and rates of presentation. A significant difference between content levels was present for impulsives, while a significant difference between rates was present for fast/accurates. With the three content levels, no significant difference between groups was found. However, with all groups combined, a significant difference between rates occurred at each content level. A significant difference between groups and between content levels was determined at the 1.0 rate of presentation. At the 1.5 rate of presentation, a significant difference existed between content levels only.In addition to a significant difference between groups at the normal rate of presentation (i.e., 1.0), all groups performed best at this rate, although the impulsive group performed less well than the other two. The narrative content level elicited the best performance from all three groups, with the impulsives again demonstrating the poorest performance. Age ranges were also evaluated revealing that the oldest group (11.6 - 12.6 years) maintained the highest scores.ConclusionsIn general, the results of this study did not support the contention that increased rates of presentation would improve listening comprehension ability among learning disabled students. It was revealing to note the consistently poorer performance of the impulsive subjects on all tasks. This finding supported research which suggested that impulsive tempo is one factor contributing to poor school performance (Messer, 1976b). The study also provided evidence that the visual processing strategies underlying differences in conceptual tempo seem to generalize to the recall of auditory materials as posited by Zelniker and Jeffrey (1976). It was their suggestion that training in task-appropriate strategies may be more effective with learning disabled students than the modification of cognitive styles.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-150). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3045090.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the use of computers can modify the focus of attention of learning disabled students in a matching task. More specifically, this study examined learning disabled students' performance (correct answers and response time for correct answers) when completing a task consisting of matching Chinese characters when presented under three display conditions: traditional card, static computer, and animated computer display.This study involved 42 subjects who were children with ages 9 through 11 and were randomly selected from a list of learning disabled students in the Muncie Community School District, Muncie, Indiana. They were in regular classrooms with special education servicing for learning disabled students. Subjects were randomly assigned into one of the three presentation methods.Previous research has shown that microcomputers have been successfully used in special education. Microcomputers can not only motivate learning disabled students to learn but also control many focus of attention related stimulus characteristics including brightness, distance between stimuli, number of stimuli, and the stability of a stimulus. Based on this research it was hypothesized: (a) that learning disabled students who visually match Chinese characters presented via static or animated computer screens would have more correct answers and have less response time for correct answers than learning disabled students who visually match Chinese characters presented via traditional cards; (b) that learning disabled students' performance in the animated computer condition would be better than that in the static computer condition; and (c) that learning disabled students' performance in these two computerized conditions would be better than that in the traditional card condition at different stimulus difficulty levels.A 3 x 5 analysis of variance with repeated measures and a Scheffe Multiple Comparison Test on Main Effects were used to analyze the data. The results of this study indicated that: (a) learning disabled students who were presented the matching task via computer screens did not demonstrate an overall improvement in focus of attention; (b) learning disabled students who were presented with the matching task via animated computer screen presentation did better than students under the static computer presentation at the easiest level of task difficulty; and (c) learning disabled students who were presented the matching task under the static computer screen presentation condition performed worse than students completing the task under the traditional card presentation condition at the easiest task difficulty level when dealing with simple tasks; and (c) that learning disabled students who were presented with Chinese characters via static computer screen might perform worse than students with traditional card presentation when completing simple tasks.The results from this study failed to completely support the main hypothesis that computerized instruction methods could improve learning disabled students' focus of attention. The possible explanations for the general unsuccessfulness of the computer conditions are that the testing materials in this study were not programmed in the sense of individualized rate and that there was no feedback regarding correct or incorrect responding or contingent reinforcement for the correct answers. Future studies should include systematic feedback for correct answers as well as computer conditions. Replication studies which use different stimuli from those of the current study to determine the generalization of the results should also be conducted. / Department of Special Education

Access to abstract restricted until 12/14/2015. / Access to thesis restricted until 12/14/2015. / Department of Educational Psychology

M.Ed. (Educational Psychology) / Please refer to full text to view abstract