Postsecondary education for students with learning disabilities.

Increasingly, students with learning disabilities are attending community colleges and traditional 4-year colleges and universities. This article presents the results of a review of the literature on services available or recommended for students with learning disabilities. The results suggest that postsecondary institutions have begun to provide a wide array of services to these students. There is little empirical evidence, however, on the effectiveness of those services. An agenda for future research is also discussed.

Reasons for job loss: a review of employment termination studies of mentally retarded workers.

The current emphasis on employment preparation for mentally retarded people requires that more attention be focused on job retention. Knowledge of the reasons why mentally retarded workers were fired from their jobs could contribute to that effort. This article reviews studies over a 35 year period that have examined job loss in mentally retarded workers. First, reasons for job loss that relate to workers' vocational competence were separated from other reasons for job loss, such as economic and family factors. Then, reasons relating to vocational competence were classified into four categories: job responsibility, task-production skills, task-related social skills, and personal-social skills. Reasons for job loss among mentally retarded workers are broadly distributed across both social and nonsocial domains, including job responsibility factors such as attendance and punctuality, task-production factors such as inadequate quality and rate of work, task-related social skill deficits such as not following instructions and responding inappropriately to criticism, and personal-social inadequacies such as inappropriate dress, bizarre and aggressive behavior, and inadequate or offensive verbal repertoires. The results of the review are discussed in relation to training issues for job retention of mentally retarded workers.

Producing generalized job initiative in severely mentally retarded sheltered workers.

The development of generalized job initiative was examined with three severely retarded men working in an industrial assembly area of a sheltered workshop. Interventions included discrimination training, role-play training, and self-monitoring. For each participant, training was applied sequentially to three sets of job initiative behaviors. Intensive training was required to establish the first set of job initiative behaviors; however, the second and third sets of job initiative behaviors were learned with only discrimination training. The discussion summarizes the findings and suggests research needed to develop more powerful learning-to-learn paradigms.

Behaviors that contribute to entry-level employment. A profile of five jobs.

Research has identified many behaviors that appear to be related to the employment success of mentally retarded workers. In this study, competitive employment supervisors who were drawn from five entry-level occupations judged the importance and frequency of 23 work-related behaviors. Differences were found between the jobs in the relative importance and frequency of some behaviors. Moreover, there was a set of important core skills that was found to be generally applicable across entry-level jobs. The data are discussed in terms of their relevance for developing employment preparation curricula for entry-level workers.