Setting instructional goals is one of the most important activities of special educators. When goals are clearly known by students and teachers, corrective action can be initiated quickly to ensure continued progress when a student's performance deteriorates (Howell, Kaplan, & O'Connell, 1979). Setting ambitious goals has been shown to have a positive effect on how special education teachers teach, as well as how their students achieve (Fuchs, Fuchs, & Deno, 1985; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Harnlett, 1989).
Elementary-aged students with behavioral concerns and disabilities struggling to construct sentences stand a high likelihood for continued academic difficulty. Several studies have used sentence instruction with picture-word prompts to improve sentence level writing skills, including construction of simple sentences, syntax, capitalization, and punctuation. Research in other academic areas, such as mathematics and reading, have found students benefited from deliberate practice procedures resulting in fluency. The present study combined sentence instruction with a practice procedure and measured its impact on the writing performance of four elementary-aged students with behavioral concerns and disabilities. The study used a single case experimental design. The intervention produced gains in the frequency of simple sentences constructed and other sentence level writing skills.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.