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N W Nelson

Publications and source records attributed to N W Nelson.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

The speech-language pathologist's role in a writing lab approach.

In a writing lab approach, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work on collaborative teams with general and special educators to foster language growth using inclusive, curriculum-based, computer-supported writing process instruction. By engaging students in authentic writing projects using recursive writing processes--planning, organizing, drafting, revising, editing, publishing, presenting--and supporting them with instructional scaffolding, peer feedback, and computers, SLPs can address individualized needs while achieving goals of the general education curriculum. Case examples illustrate how intervention can be designed to meet the needs of students with diverse disabilities to interact socially and progress academically within the general education curriculum.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗

Development of the pediatric test of brain injury.

OBJECTIVE: The Pediatric Test of Traumatic Brain Injury (PTBI) (currently in its research edition) is a tool for assessing the cognitive-linguistic skills of school-aged children and adolescents in acute care and rehabilitation settings after traumatic brain injury. Development of the PTBI was motivated by the fact that, to date, no standardized test has been available to assess the full range of cognitive-linguistic impairments associated with pediatric brain injury. In this article we describe how the research edition of the PTBI was developed, provide rationale for the areas of assessment, discuss a plan for standardization, and illustrate its use with three children with TBI. DESIGN: The PTBI was constructed to sample the attention, memory, language, reading, writing, metalinguistic, and metacognitive skills that are particularly at risk in pediatric brain injury and that are relevant to the general education curriculum. MATERIAL: The test material for the PTBI was selected on the basis of clinical and experimental evidence that children and adolescents with TBI demonstrate a wide range of cognitive and language deficits. These first appear in the early stages of recovery and often persist but change over time. CONCLUSION: Our goal is to standardize the PTBI so it can be used to establish baseline behaviors and track cognitive-linguistic recovery.

Accidents, Traffic↗

The effects of text-based and graphics-based software tools on planning and organizing of stories.

This article describes a research study comparing the effects of two computer-based writing tools on the story-writing skills of fourth-through eighth-grade students with language-related learning disabilities. The first tool, the prompted writing feature of FrEdWriter (Rogers, 1985), allowed students to answer story grammar questions, then type stories using those responses as the plan; the second tool, Once Upon a Time (Urban, Rushing, & Star, 1990), allowed students to create graphic scenes, then type stories about those scenes. Nine students attended a series of after-school writing labs twice weekly for 11 weeks, using each tool for half of the writing sessions. Group results did not clearly favor either tool; however, individual differences suggested that use of planning features should be linked to student needs. Students who had less internal organizational ability benefited from the computer-presented story grammar prompts and wrote less mature stories when using the graphics-based tool. Students with relatively strong organizational skills wrote more mature stories with the graphics-based tool.

Achievement↗

Comprehension of Standard English at varied speaking rates by children whose major dialect is Black English.

Comprehension of spoken Standard English was measured via a picture selection task for 80 Black English (BE) speaking and 80 Standard English (SE) speaking children at four age levels between 5 years, 6 months, and 9 years, 6 months. Test stimuli consisted of four syntactically matched groups of eight sentences divided into two levels of difficulty. The four groups of sentences were heard by all Ss at four different speaking rates from 4.9 (fast) through 2.5 (slow) syllables per second. Results showed that BE speaking children had greater difficulty comprehending spoken SE than the SE speaking control Ss. Significant age and difficulty effects were found for both groups; a significant rate effect was found for the BE speaking group only; and sentence difficulty was found to interact differently with age for the two groups.

Black or African American↗