In Texas, placement of educable mentally retarded (EMR) students has required three factors-- intellectual assessment, educational appraisal, and adaptive behavior. This study examined 28 reclassified EMR students to determine which assessment factor is least stable in defining EMR and to determine significance of change in assessment scores. Data were secured from school records. Type of intellectual assessment test used varied greatly and was found to be the most inconsistent placement factor. However, educational appraisal scores contributed to over half the reclassifications. Adaptive behavior did not contribute to any reclassification. Due to limited sampling and variety of assessment tests, significance of change in scores was not determined. Generally, on retest,performance IQ scores were elevated while verbal IQ scores remained the same.

Twenty-one special education children failing to persist after failure on arithmetic problems were given 15 days of treatment in three arithmetic training programs, equivalent in all respects except that success experiences occurred either 46.2%, 76.9%, or 100% of the time. Following training, children in both the 46.2% and 100% reinforcement, groups continued to show serious performance deterioration following failure, while children in the 76.9% group showed marked improvement. An inventory measuring attributions to failure before and after training indicated that the 76.9% reinforcement group showed significantly greater tendency to attribute failure to lack of effort than did either of the other two groups.