Teaching learning disabled students goal-implementation skills

✍ Scribed by Nona Tollefson; D. B. Tracy; E. P. Johnsen; Jaclyn Chatman

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 749 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0033-3085
• DOI: 10.1002/1520-6807(198604)23:2<194::aid-pits2310230213>3.0.co;2-c

✦ Synopsis

Eight learning disabled (LD) junior high school students were taught goal-setting and self-regulatory skills in a resource room setting. The training program was designed to help students set realistic goals, develop plans to achieve these goals, monitor and evaluate their own behavior, and accept responsibility for the outcome of goal-directed activities. The goal-implementation strategy was effective in increasing some students' rates of assignment completion in the resource room and the regular classroom. Following the training program, students attributed success to effort; failure was attributed to effort, luck, and task difficulty.

For young adolescents, junior high school is the place to try out new roles and to develop new skills that are needed in school and later in life. For learning disabled (LD) adolescents, however, junior high school is all too frequently a place of failure. These students typically lack the skills and work habits that are valued by teachers in the junior high school environment. Learning disabled adolescents have low academic performance (Warner, Alley, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1980), poorly developed planning skills (