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This paper identifies trends in the population of students with learning disabilities (LD) in the public schools and explores reasons for these trends. It notes that there has been a 198 percent increase in the number of children served as LD between 1976-77 and 1992-93 due to a lack of consensus on the definition of LD and school-level processes designed to identify and provide services to students. It contrasts the authoritative definition of LD produced by the National Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children with various school-level processes that foster straying from these specifications. It notes the large amount of subjectivity at each stage of the process, including the teacher referral, the assessment process, and eligibility deliberations. Other reasons for the expansion of the LD concept include the common practice of ignoring exclusionary criteria and eligibility based on assessments conducted at one point in time. The paper goes on to note curricular consequences of the resulting heterogeneity of the school-identified LD population. It finds an unhealthy schism between research and practice fueled in part by the discrepancy between school-identified and research-identified students with LD. It proposes refinement of categories and multiple assessments of student progress. (DB)

This study examined the role that stress in school and the family plays in early adolescents' adjustment during the transition from elementary to middle school. A total of 773 students (388 boys and 385 girls) from suburban communities in the northeastern United States were assessed at 3 time points: spring of Grade 5, fall of Grade 6, and spring of Grade 6. The students completed a school stress survey, daily hassles questionnaire, perceived social support scale, self-perception profile, depression inventory, and linking school scale. The results indicated that school stress at the beginning of the school year was an important predictor of the adjustment to the transition to middle school, over and above the affects of prior adjustment. Social support from family and teachers at the beginning of the school year was found to have both direct and indirect buffering effects. In addition, students who had more stress and experienced more depression in Grade 5 were likely to find the move into middle school more stressful than those students who experienced less stress and depression. (Contains 11 references.) (MDM)

Students with learning disabilities typically experience more stress than other students at school, as a result of peer rejection, academic difficulties, and changing classroom environments, but may have fewer resources and abilities to cope with this stress. This paper outlines the knowledge and skills that teachers need to help alleviate stress in their students. The goal of the instructional intervention approach is to help students develop techniques and skills to manage stress on their own. Instructional approaches to stress management include: using relaxation techniques and visualization, utilizing positive self talk to minimize the power of stressors, recognizing when negative self talk serves to maximize the stress of an experience, developing problem solving and decision-making strategies to use when confronted with stressors, and developing and utilizing social supports. (22 references) (JDD)

This study examined the ability of 56 children with mental retardation and 58 children (grades 1-5) without mental retardation to perform two key social cognitive processes: social perception (the encoding and interpretation of social cues) and the generation of strategies for resolving social conflicts. These processes were assessed as children viewed a series of videotaped vignettes which depicted two types of social conflicts (peer entry or peer provocation) and which also varied according to the type of intentions portrayed. Results indicated that children with mental retardation: (1) had greater difficulty in the encoding and interpretation of benign intention cues; (2) generated fewer assertive strategies and had greater difficulty generating different strategies as a function of shifting social conflicts; and (3) like children without mental retardation, shift their strategies based on whether or not they interpret another child's intentions as "mean." The importance of social perception in guiding how children with mental retardation respond to varied social conflicts is discussed. (Author/CR)