Training Program For Mild Mentally Retarded Children On Transitive Reasoning Ability: An ATI Study

As educable children with special need, more and more mild mentally retarded children go to regular classroom to accept education within the trend of inclusion. In order to let the children with special needs get effective individualized instruction, the techniques of tutoring become a challenge issue in the special education. The aim of this dissertation is to apply the aptitude-treatment interaction theory, which called "an awakening sleeping giant" in the area of educational psychology, into the training program of transitive reasoning ability for the mild retarded from grade 3 to 5, with the technique of components analysis to find the deficiencies in the process of solving three-term series problems. In other words, the study tries to use ATI model to match abilities, instruction, and assessment in an effective way.The dissertation is divided into three parts. In the first part, the deficiencies of the subjects in the process of solving three-term series problems, which are four simplest forms in transitive reasoning, are discovered under using the componential analysis, a method often used in cognitive study. The results of this part are asfollowing: 1) there are two main kinds of deficiencies within the process--lack ofsome processing components, or/and the deficiency in the connection of different components; 2) great heterogeneity within the subjects is also shown, as a result four types of deficiency are identified among 28 subjects; 3) the IQ score is not the function of the performance in the three-term series problem-solving, that is, in mild retarded children, the IQ is not a sensitive index to show the transitive reasoning ability.In the second part, 4 experiments are designed to identified most effective instructional treatment for different types of deficiency. Domain-specific and domain-general knowledge in the content version, the task analysis and promptingmethod in the pedagogic level, the visual, audile, and visual+audile presentation way, and delay or immediate feedback are compared respectively. The results show different types of deficiency are match with different treatment. But there are some exceptional results compared with other studies of normal subjects. The terms with domain-specific knowledge do not show any advantage; while both visual and audile presentation way is also not as effective as expected.The results of the program are assessed in the third part from three aspects: the three-term series problems which are exactly the same in form as the training program; the transferring problems with include four terms or neglect words; the analogy reasoning problems from The Raven. It is shown that the experimental group trained within ATI model perform significantly better than control group on all three aspects. The study shows the lacking components of processing are compensated quieted well, while the deficiency in the connection of components is not compensated very well. It is indicated that the amount of training items are not enough to let the subjects become automatized in the processing. In addition, there is no evidence shown to indicate that both experimental and control group gain far transferring.At last the situation of the application of the ATI theory and model in the field of special education is also discussed in the dissertation.