Educational Terms

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Abstract reasoning: The ability to comprehend relationships, and to react appropriately not only to concrete objects but also to complex concepts and symbols.
Academic achievement: Level of performance in one or more of the basic school subjects as measured by standardized tests; how well the student is learning with traditional school subjects.
Academic Aptitude: The perceived ability a person has to understand and complete the basic school subjects as measured by standardized tests.
Accreditation: A voluntary process that schools may choose to pursue. The various accrediting organizations have specific requirements, standards and guidelines to which each school must adhere. Upon completion, the participating schools receive credentials that maintain the standards for their institution. See more information.
ADD-Attention deficit disorder / ADHD-Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: "The essential features of this disorder are developmentally inappropriate degrees of inattention, impulsiveness, and hyperactivity. People with the disorder generally display some disturbance in each of these areas, but to varying degrees. Consideration of the child's developmental level must be taken into account. Discerning whether the behavior is considerably more frequent than that of most people of the same mental age requires a judgment by someone who is familiar with children's behavior." (American Psychiatric Association, 1987, p. 50)
Additional Schools: An educational facility that currently is not licensed or accredited. Accreditation is NOT MANDATORY in Texas. It is a voluntary process.
Affiliation/Organization: A variety of educational associations which are available to schools and individuals by voluntary membership to enhance their professional development.
Alphabetic Phonics: A phonics-based, sequential teaching method often used when working with children with language-learning difficulties.
Alternative School: An educational facility that implements an individualized or alternative curriculum to meet specific needs of its students.
Anomia: Difficulty in recalling or remembering words or the names of objects.
Aphasia: Loss or impairment of the ability to use words and to understand language symbols in reading, writing, or speaking. Usually results from organic defects of the brain.
Apraxia: The impairment or loss of ability to perform purposeful movements. A disorder in which sensory pathways are intact, but relatively uncomplicated movements become clumsy.
Aptitude: The interest in and capacity to profit from training in a particular area.
Articulation-speech problem: Inability to articulate words clearly without notable pronunciation or articulatory problems.
Associative learning: The cognitive state in which a learned item tends to be recalled when a specific cue or stimulus is experienced.
Ataxia: Poor coordination of voluntary muscle action.
Audiologist: A specialist in preventing, identifying, and assessing hearing disorders, and providing treatment and rehabilitative services for those who have them.
Auditorially handicapped student: One who has been determined to have a serious hearing loss even after corrective medical treatment or use of amplification.
Auditory: Relating to sound.
Auditory blending: The ability to combine independent sounds to form words.
Auditory discrimination: Generally refers to the ability to differentiate among similar sounds or among words that contain similar sounds. Difficulty with this usually results in reduced ability to understand spoken material.
Auditory perception: The ability to interpret or organize the sensory data received through the ear.
Autism: A severe impairment in the development of reciprocal social interaction, in the development of verbal and nonverbal communication skills, and in imaginative activity. Often, there is a markedly restricted repertoire of activities and interests, which frequently are stereotyped and repetitive.
Average: A statistical term used to describe a measure of central tendency usually used to denote the arithmetic mean; average indicates a range of scores into which most of the population (68%) will fall.
Background accommodation: The ability to accommodate black/white contrasts in contexts including sheet music, pages of math problems, and textbooks. Reports include the inability to tolerate the background, which may appear to glare or dominate, making characters less legible.
Basil-reader approach: A method of teaching reading in which instruction is given through the use of a series of basal readers. The authors of the series determine sequence of skills, content, vocabulary and activities. Teacher's manuals and children's activity books accompany the basal reading series.
Behavior modification: A technique of changing human behavior based on the theory of operant behavior or and conditioning. Careful observation of events preceding and following the behavior in question is required. The environment is manipulated to reinforce the desired responses, thereby bringing about the desired change in behavior.
Blue Ribbon Award: The Department of Education bestows an elite award for academic excellence to select school facilities. The school candidates are first nominated by state education agencies and undergo a stringent application process that evaluates academic curriculum and test scores in addition to parent involvement activities and student spirit. Once the school has received Blue Ribbon status, they maintain credibility for academic excellence. There is a six-year time restraint before the educational institution may resubmit for recognition of Blue Ribbon status.
Borderline intelligence: Intellectual functioning in the range of one to two standard deviations below the test mean (68-83 on the Stanford Binet, or 70-84 on the Wechsler). Sometimes referred to as slow learner.
Cerebral dominance: The control of activities the brain, with one hemisphere considered consistancely dominant over the other. In most individuals, the left side of the brain controls function, and the left side is considered the dominant hemisphere.
Chronological age: Actual age measured from date of birth to present.
Cognition: The act or process of knowing; thinking skills, learning processes.
Concept: A general idea of the characteristics of a class or group of objects.
Conceptual disorders: A disturbance in the thinking process and cognitive activities, or a disturbance in the ability to formulate concepts.
Consonant: The sounds formed by altering, modifying, obstructing the stream of vocal sound with the organs of speech teeth, tongue, etc. Represented by all the letters of the alphabet except vowels.
Context clues: Using the meaning of a situation or reading passage to guess at words one doesn't know.
Counseling: Professional guidance on the basis of knowledge of human behavior and the use of special interviewing skills to achieve specified goals that are beneficial to the individual and mutually accepted by counselor and client.
Counselor: One who offers professional guidance based on knowledge of human behavior.
Criterion-referenced text: A test, standardized or non-standardized, that measures precisely the information or behavior that is to be learned; individuals' are compared with some established criterion, rather than with other individuals.
Cultural deprivation: The condition in which the infant or young child receives insufficient, inconsistent or inappropriate stimulation or care.
Curriculum Alternative: An educational facility that implements a specialized curriculum that is unique to that school
Decoding: Breaking down the written word to determine its meaning. Involves the use of phonics or word-attack skills.
Depth perception: The ability to judge distance accurately.
Developmental-articulation disorder: The essential failure to develop consistently correct articulation of the later-acquired speech sounds such as r, sh, th, f, z l or ch.
Developmental-coordination disorder: Marked impairment in the development of motor coordination. The manifestations of this disorder vary with age and development Young children exhibit clumsiness and delays in developmental motor milestones *including tying shoelaces, buttoning shirts, and zipping pants); older children display difficulties with the motor aspects of puzzle assembly, model-building, playing ball and printing or handwriting.
Developmental delay: When a child's social, emotional, or academic progress seems to temporarily lag behind what would be expected of the chronological age but that is expected to catch up without causing long-term difficulty.
Developmental imbalance: A disparity in the developmental patterns of intellectual skills.
Developmental-language disorder: May involve difficulty in either comprehending oral language (receptive type) or in the expressing verbal language (expressive type).
Developmental reading: The pattern and sequence of normal reading growth and development in a child in the learning-to-read process.
Developmental-reading disorder: Marked impairment in the development of word-recognition skills and reading comprehension. Oral reading is characterized by omissions, distortions, and substitutions of words and by slow, halted reading. Reading comprehension is also affected. This disorder has been referred to as “dyslexia”.
Developmental-writing disorder: Marked impairment in the development of expressive writing skills. Spelling errors, grammatical or punctuation errors within sentences, or poor paragraph organization may mark the impairment in the ability to compose written text.
Discrimination: Noticing the difference between two different things.
Dominant hemisphere: Most frequently used to refer to the cerebral hemisphere, either left or right, that controls movement on the opposite side.
Dyscalculia: Inability to perform mathematical calculations with normal teaching.
Dysgraphia: Inability to express thoughts in writing and/ or difficulty writing symbols (i.e. letters and numbers).
Echolalia: Parrot-like repetition of words, phrases, or sentences with no apparent understanding of the utterance.
Educable mentally retarded (EMR): Those who have an IQ between 55 and 75 as measured on an individual psychological test.
Educational diagnostician: A professional trained to administer and interpret educational and psychological tests.
Encoding: The expressive habits in the language process response formation, including word selection, syntax, grammar, and the actual motor production of the response (i.e., how one speaks the language).
Expressive language: Language directed toward someone else. Ordinarily refers to spoken or written language but may include gestures or signs.
Figure-ground (perception): The ability to attend to one aspect of the visual field while perceiving it in relation to the rest of the field.
Fine-motor skills: Inability relating to development and awareness of small muscle movement. Relates to such motions as those involved in writing, carving, and painting pictures.
Gifted: Those who excel consistently or who show potential to excel in one or a combination of the following areas general intellectual ability, specific subject matter aptitude, creative and productive thinking ability, leadership ability, ability in the visual and performing arts, and psychomotor ability.
Gross-motor skills: Activities that use the large muscles of the body as in running, jumping, lifting, etc.
Hyperactivity: Higher than expected level of motor activity; disorganized, disruptive, and impulsive behavior; overreaction to stimuli.
Hyperkinesis: Similar to hyperactivity but more frequently used to describe the "fidgety" child. One who may be in constant motion even while seated; constant movement without an apparent purpose.
Hypoactivity: Significantly less-than-expected motor activity and difficulty in sustaining attention; unresponsive, tendency to withdraw, inattentive to stimuli.
Individual Educational Plan (IEP): A specific, individualized educational prescription designed to meet the special educational needs of someone with a learning or developmental disability.
Impulsivity: The tendency to react to a stimulus immediately, without adequate reflection or deliberation.
Intelligence quotient: A numerical value used to describe the relative level of intelligence. Formerly determined by mental age, as measured by intelligence tests, multiplied by 100 and divided by the chronological age. Currently all major standardized individual intelligence tests present the IQ in terms of standard scores that provide comparisons with chronological-age peers.
Kinesthetic: Pertaining to motor and is the perception of consciousness of one's own muscular movements.
Language associations: Connecting words or acts (such as social situations) to their meanings. Use of abstract reasoning skills.
Language-experience approach to reading: A method of teaching reading and other skills based on the experience of children. The method frequently involves the generation of experience-based materials that are dictated by the child, written down by the teacher, then used in class as the material for teaching reading.
Laterality: Involves the awareness of the two sides of one's body and the ability to identify them correctly as left or right.
Learning disability: A global term used to indicate some specific difficulty that impedes learning in traditional ways.
Learning specialist: A professional who usually acts as a support system to teachers and focuses on analyzing the child’s learning style and approach to school work.
Mainstream: Placing of children with handicaps within the school's regular education system, particularly in the regular classroom.
Maturational lag: Slowness in certain specialized aspects of neurological development.
Median: The middle point in a set of scores arranged in order of magnitude. Fifty percent of the scores lie at or above the median.
Memory: The ability to store and retrieve upon demand previously experienced sensations and perception, even when the stimulus that originally evoked them is no longer present.
Mental age: The level of measured mental ability or capacity as determined by an intelligence test. It is distinguished from the chronological age of the individual.
Mental retardation: Significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning accompanied by significant deficits or impairments in adaptive functioning, with onset before the age of 18.
Modality: The pathways (senses) through which an individual receives information, and thereby learns.
Montessori: An educational facility that implements Maria Montessori's philosophy of early childhood education.
Multiple-handicapped student: A student whose handicapping condition is expected to continue indefinitely; whose disabilities require comprehensive instruction and related services; and whose disabilities impair performance in psychomotor skills, self-care skills, communication, social and emotional development, and cognition.
Multisensory: Generally applied to training procedures that simultaneously utilize more than one sense modality.
Non-public/private school: An institution that educates its students according to its own curriculum. Schools operate under a profit or non-profit status.
Non-verbal ability: The power or special skills necessary to perform an act or task, physical or mental, not involving the use of words.
Norm-referenced tests: Used to evaluate an individual's performance in relation to the performance of others on the same measure. The individual's performance is compared with that of a normative group.
Orton Dyslexia Society: An international organization committed to the promotion of research, understanding, and treatment of specific language difficulties.
Orton-Gillingham: A phonics-based method of teaching reading. It teaches the learner to decode words by blending one sound with another into words and requires extensive visual and auditory drill.
Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP): The federal office responsible for overseeing state compliance with the Education for All Handicapped Children .Act (EHA), Public Law 94-142 Amended.
Pediatric neurologist: Evaluates motor strength, coordination, balance, reflexes, sensation, vision and hearing. Evaluation may include blood tests and urinalyses.
Percentile rank: A point in a distribution at or below which the scores of a given percentage of individuals fall.
Perception: The process of organizing or interpreting the raw data obtained through the senses.
Phonetics: A study of all the speech sounds in language and how these sounds are produced .
Phonics: The system of relating speech sounds to specific letters or letter combinations.
Physical therapy: The treatment of neuromotor or trauma-associated disturbances of motor function. May involve the use of therapeutic exercises, gait training, balance training, or the application of various therapeutic modalities.
Psychoeducational evaluation: An evaluation by a psychologist or educational diagnostician that tests the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using language, spoken and written, in an attempt to identify the presence of learning disabilities.
Psychological testing: A general term to describe a process of assessment that measures or evaluates abilities or personality traits, either general or specific.
Psychometric testing: A series of various psychological tests administered to test one or several of the factors in mental ability, such as intelligence, special abilities, manual skills, vocational aptitudes and interests, and personality characteristics that can be measured objectively.
Psychomotor delay: The failure to develop appropriate physical reactions, speech, and appropriately adaptive environmental responses within the normal developmental time frame, as a result of central nervous system or severe psychogenic disturbance.
Public school: A school or educational institution supported by taxation from local or state sources
Reading level: An indication of the difficulty of reading material in terms of the grade level at which it might be expected to be read successfully.
Reading-comprehension problem: Inability to understand what one has read. Person cannot recall story and paraphrase plot, cannot explain or relate meaningfulness of what has been read.
Recall: The ability to remember and retrieve into active memory.
Receptive language: Understanding language messages from others. Generally related to spoken or written language but may include the comprehension of gestures.
Resource room: An educational setting in which a child receives concentrated remedial instruction in an area of learning difficulty while continuing in the mainstream of the educational setting.
Reversal: One of the perceptual problems associated with reading disability and dyslexia. The mirror-image perception of letters, symbols, or words.
Rotation: The perception of letters, symbols, numbers or words, as rotated in space. The rotation is frequently 180-360 degrees but may be of any magnitude.
School phobia: A neurotic manifestation of fear of attending school that exceeds age-appropriate, normally expected parameters.
Scope of focus: The ability to perceive groups of letters, notes, numerals, or words at the same time.
Semantics: The meanings of words and phrases.
Slow learner: A child with social behavior and/or academic achievement less than that expected on the basis of chronological age. In the range of one to two standard deviations below the mean (69-83 on the Stanford-Binet, or 70-84 on the Wechsler).
Spatial orientation problem: Behavioral manifestations include difficulty with concepts such as right/left, front/back, up/down; inability to group relationships among parts of Gestalt Test so as to be able to reproduce it correctly; and reversals in printing or writing letters or numbers.
Spatial relationships: Refers to the perceived position of two or more objects or subjects in relation to the observer and in relation to each other.
Specific learning disability (SLD): As defined in Texas Public Law 94-142 Amended (Education of All Handicapped Children Act), "SLD means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations." The term does not include learning problems that are primarily the result of visual, auditory, or motor handicaps; of mental retardation or severe emotional disturbance; or of environment.al, cultural, or economic disadvantage.
Speech therapy: A specialized area of evaluation and treatment involving disorders of speech, language, voice, and fluency. Utilizes a variety of techniques to correct and improve language function verbal communications.
Speech language pathologist: A professional concerned with facilitating the normal development of communication, as well as treating speech and language disorders. Services include prevention, identification, evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation of people with such problems.
Standard deviation: A statistical measurement used to describe the distance from the mean.
Standard scores: Raw scores that have been transformed to have a given mean and standard deviation.
Stanine: A contraction of standard nine; provides a single-digit scoring system with a mean of 5 and a standard deviation of 2.
Stuttering: A non-fluency of speech in which the even and regular flow of words is disrupted by rapid repetition of certain speech elements.
Sustained focus: The ability to maintain focus except with the employment of inordinate energy and effort.
Tactile: Refers to the perception of cutaneous stimuli through the sense of touch. Pertaining to the sense of touch.
Tactile perception: The ability to interpret and give meaning of sensory stimuli experienced through the sense of touch.
Verbal test: An intelligence test or sub-test that requires the use of language to understand the problem and produce the required response.
Visual perception: The identification, organization, and interpretation of sensory data received by the individual through the eye.
Visual resolution: The ability to see the print clearly and free of distortions, whether involving words, numerals, or musical notes.
Visually handicapped student: A student who has been determined by a licensed ophthalmologist or optometrist to have no vision or a serious visual loss after correction.
Visual-motor coordination: The ability to coordinate vision with the movements of the body or parts of the body.
Visual-motor skills: Skills normally accomplished through visual perception and integrated motor response. Often involving spatial relationship and tactile perception.
Whole-language approach: An approach to teaching reading that involves focus on the words as whole entities (i.e. does not focus on the phonetic structure of words).
Word-attack skills: Skills that help a child to pronounce and understand words that are read. These skills involve phonics, recognizing context clues, and structural clues.