This study evaluated the effectiveness of promoting relational thinking, using “elaborative interrogation” techniques, to facilitate the content acquisition of elementary school students with mild disabilities. Three conditions were used: control, experimenter-provided explanation, and student-generated explanation. Results indicated that both explanation groups significantly outperformed the control group on recall of facts, as well as explanations. Students coached in relational thinking statistically outperformed those in the control condition and descriptively outperformed students in the experimenter-provided explanation condition on immediate recall. Students in the student-generated explanation condition statistically outperformed both groups in delayed factual recall.

This investigation sought to determine whether elaborative interrogation techniques would facilitate recall of information relevant to, but not included in, mnemonic and representational pictures. Fifty-three adolescents with learning disabilities or mild mental retardation were taught information about nine reasons for dinosaur extinction, ranked in order of plausibility. In the direct teaching condition, students were provided with each ordered reason and an explanation for why that reason may have resulted in dinosaur extinction. In the elaborative interrogation condition, students were provided with each ordered reason and prompted and questioned to provide an explanation for each. In the mnemonic elaborative interrogation condition, students were provided with mnemonic peg-words to facilitate recall of the ordered reasons for dinosaur extinction and also coached and prompted to provide explanations. Students' recall of ordered reasons was higher in the mnemonic elaborative interrogation condition, and students in the two elaborative interrogation conditions recalled more explanations than did students in the direct teaching condition. Further, students in both elaborative interrogation conditions more accurately linked reasons with explanations for those reasons. Findings are discussed with respect to previous findings of mnemonic instruction. Implications for teaching students with mild cognitive disabilities are provided.

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This investigation assessed the effectiveness of coaching active reasoning of students with learning disabilities. Sixty-three fourth- and fifth-grade students with learning disabilities were assigned at random to one of three treatment conditions: coaching, provided explanation, or no explanation control. In the coaching condition, students were provided factual information followed by a sequence of questions designed to help them construct explanations for the information. In the provided explanation condition, students were concurrently provided both the factual information and the associated explanations. Students in the no explanation control condition received only the target information. Results indicated that students in the coaching condition outperformed students in the two comparison conditions on immediate and 1-week delayed tests of both factual information and explanations. Further, it was found that a variety of levels of coaching support was required to lead students to construct their own explanations. Implications for future research and instruction for students with learning disabilities are discussed.

This study reports findings and policy recommendations from a research project that applied a relational resilience framework to a study of 60 sole parent families in New Zealand, with approximately equal numbers of Māori, Pacific, and European (White) participants. The sole parent families involved were already known to be resilient and the study focused on identifying the relationships and strategies underlying the achievement and maintenance of their resilience. The study was carried out to provide an evidence base for the development and implementation of policies and interventions to both support sole parent families who have achieved resilience and assist those who struggle to do so. The three populations shared many similarities in their pathways to becoming sole parents and the challenges they faced as sole parents. The coping strategies underlying their demonstrated resilience were also broadly similar, but the ways in which they were carried out did vary in a manner that particularly reflected cultural practices in terms of their reliance upon extended family-based support or support from outside the family. The commonalities support the appropriateness of the common conceptual framework used, whereas the differences underline the importance of developing nuanced policy responses that take into account cultural differences between the various populations to which policy initiatives are directed.