ABSTRACT
During the past decade, significant advances have occurred in intelligence theory (Sternberg, 1981), instructional psychology (Resnick, 1982), and cognitivebehavior modification (Meichenbaum, 1977; Meyers & Craighead, 1984). These advances raised expectations that theoretically based intervention research would result in dramatically improved performance on training and transfer tasks for children with learning disabilities, mental retardation, and other special needs. In recent years, however, increasing evidence suggests that these expectations were not readily achieved (Borkowski & Cavanaugh, 1979; Campione & Brown, 1977; Hagan, Barclay, & Newman, 1982) and that current conceptualizations of intelligence and cognition, at least as translated into instructional research, provide only a partial understanding of the skills and processes needed to facilitate performance in special needs children. The problem is most clearly seen when the phenomena of strategy generalization is considered (Borkowski & Cavanaugh, 1979; Campione & Brown, t977; Torgesen & Licht, 1983): Leamingdisabled and mentally retarded children who are taught new learning strategies often do not use these strategies on transfer tasks similar to the training task (Kirk & Gallagher, 1979).
