Modifying attitudes toward persons with hearing impairments. A comprehensive review of the research.

Negative attitudes toward persons with hearing impairments adversely affect their opportunities and self-concepts. Thus, modifying such attitudes is of concern to educators and researchers. An exhaustive search of the literature yielded 12 reports of research on modifying attitudes toward persons with hearing impairments. The research results were mixed--some studies even yielded negative attitude outcomes--and the quality of the studies was not high. Of the treatments studied, properly structured contact in particular showed promise for improving attitudes toward persons with hearing impairments.

Stability of cohesion in the spoken narratives of language-impaired and normally developing school-aged children.

The short-term stability of the cohesion scores for the spoken narratives of language-impaired and normally developing school-aged children was investigated. Narratives were obtained from 39 language-impaired and 39 normal-language children, aged 8-10 years, at four 2-week intervals. Reliability coefficients for scores from five measures--two for cohesive adequacy and three for verbal productivity--were of adequate magnitude for analysis. Mean cohesive adequacy scores were stable across narratives, but stability coefficients were only moderately large. Stability coefficients for verbal productivity scores were sufficiently large for research purposes; mean scores were most similar between testing Times 2 and 3, indicating that stability increased after children had experience telling stories.