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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Children with disabilities--Education; Elementary school teaching; Instructional materials centers;

Abstract

There has been a dramatic upswing in the number of resource classrooms and students in the last decade. There has also been a lack of research regarding resource students in the resource setting. While teachers have assured that regular classroom practices or methods used with other specialized populations were also appropriate for this new kind of student and setting little research has been done to either support or reject these practices or methods. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect which assigning class takes in a fixed order, rather than a random order, had on the numbers of problems completed and the numbers of disruptions made by two resource room students in the resource room setting.

The population of this study was two elementary students in a rural northeastern Iowa school district. The girl, a fourth grader, and the boy, a fifth grader, had both been staffed as learning disabled and emotionally disturbed. Both students had attended the resource room seventy minutes daily with two other subjects, but both had worked on independent work.

An ABAB single subject design employed because random sampling was not possible in the resource room and because the design allowed the focus of attention to be drawn on subjects' individual behaviors. The phases differed only in whether daily assignments were presented in a fixed or random fashion.

Three sets of data were analyzed. Each subject's scores were analyzed individually for both the number of problems completed and disruptions made. Then the combined scores for both subjects were analyzed. Visual inspection showed that in each analysis the number of problems completed by the subjects in the fixed phases was greater than the number of disruptions made in the two random phases. The results were consistent for both subjects individually and for the combined data.

The results definitely indicate that assigning tasks in fixed rather than random order does increase the number of problems completed and decrease the number of disruptions made by resource room students in the resource room setting. However, while the results do contribute to the understanding of the resource room child in the resource room setting areas for further study, including the use of differing assignments and behaviors and of group work were suggested.

Year of Submission

1979

Degree Name

Specialist in Education

Department

Department of Special Education

First Advisor

Marion Thompson

Comments

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Date Original

1979

Object Description

1 PDF file (105 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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