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Biomedical subjects

J Todman

Publications and source records attributed to J Todman.

13 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

Changes following community living skills training: a controlled study.

Fifty-seven adults with mild to moderate learning disability served as participants in a community living skills training programme. Twenty-nine were trained using in vivo techniques, 13 were taught using classroom techniques and 15 acted as a no treatment control group. Assessments of community living skills and adaptive behaviour found those receiving in vivo training performed significantly better than the other groups. Eventual placement in the community reflected this superiority.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1997

The Chief Scientist reports... A controlled investigation of changes following a programme of community living, skills training and the validation of these changes through relocation.

Fifty-seven adults with mild to moderate learning disabilities served as subjects in a community living skills training project. Twenty-nine subjects were trained using in vivo techniques, 13 were taught using classroom techniques and 15 subjects acted as a no-treatment control group. The effects of the training programme were assessed using videotaped assessments rated by independent observers and the in vivo techniques were found to be significantly superior to the teaching and no-treatment control conditions. These effects were still evident at one year and two year follow-up assessments. Two years after the final follow-up, eventual relocation was examined and the in vivo group were found to have significantly more independent living circumstances than either of the two control groups.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1996

Conversational perspectives in a communication aid for non-vocal people.

A computer-based text storage and retrieval system (TALK) has recently been developed as a conversation aid for non-vocal people. To facilitate the rapid retrieval (and synthesised speech output) of stored content, potential utterances on each conversational topic are organised according to three intersecting perspectives. The perspectives are "person' (me, you), "time' (past, present, future), and "issue' (what, when, where, who, how, why). Although the system has been shown capable of supporting free-flowing conversation with relatively short pauses preceding the user's turns at speech, the perspective organisation is probably less than ideal for some topics. An experiment was conducted to see whether, over a number of conversational topics, storage and retrieval of potential utterances would be faster with the existing, uniform, set of perspectives or with different sets of perspectives tailored to each topic. At the storage stage, the "uniform' set of perspectives facilitated more rapid classification of potential utterances than the "tailored' sets. At the retrieval stage, however, repetition of the classification decisions was more accurate (without being any slower) for the tailored sets of perspectives, suggesting that retrieval of stored utterances during conversation may be faster when the perspective organisation is tailored to topics.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Effect of vitamin and mineral supplementation on verbal and non-verbal reasoning of schoolchildren.

In a randomised controlled trial the effect of vitamin and mineral supplementation for seven months on performance in tests of reasoning was studied in 86 schoolchildren aged 11-13. A small, non-significant difference between the control and supplementation groups was found in a non-verbal test. The net difference in change in scores between the active and placebo groups was 2.4 units (95% CI-1.5 to 6.3). This direction of effect was not consistently seen with three other tests of non-verbal reasoning. Vitamin and mineral supplementation does not improve the performance of schoolchildren in tests of reasoning.

Administration, Oral↗
PubMed1989

Structured role orientation and academic self-concept in the secondary school.

Gordon's (1978) School Environment Preference Survey (SEPS) and Cohen's (1976) six-item adaptation of the Brookover (1967) Self-Concept of Academic Ability Scale were administered to 25 pupils in each of the first four years in a Scottish secondary school. The correlations obtained provide support for Gordon's (1971) hypothesis that pupils with a high degree of structured role orientation, as measured by the SEPS, lack confidence in their academic ability. In addition, there was a decrease in SEPS scores and an increase in academic self-concept over successive year levels.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

High speed memory scanning in retarded and non-retarded adolescents.

Four groups of 13-14-year-olds, classified on the basis of Raven's Progressive Matrices scores as intellectually above average, average, below average and retarded, were subjects in a Sternberg (1966) type memory scanning task in which memory sets of two, three and four letters were used. Slope values of the memory search function did not differ between groups, whereas intercept values decreased with higher intelligence up to the average intelligence level. There was an overall inverse relation between intercept values and intelligence (r = -0.77) and similar relations obtained within the three non-retarded groups (rs greater than or equal to -0.57), but not within the retarded group (r = -0.06). Possible connections between these results and findings from inspection time studies are discussed.

Adolescent↗