Old-school thinking: Put special-needs students in a separate classroom. Design lessons just for them. It's better for them, and for the "regular" students.

Of course, society doesn't work that way. With a few exceptions, once they're out of school, people with learning disabilities, mental retardation, or autism are on their own. What shelters children in school can inhibit them in life.

Jason Travers, a 30-year-old doctoral student and visiting lecturer in the nationally recognized department of special education, believes educators can do better. He believes early stimulation of kids with special needs will offer them a better chance of performing in classrooms and in the world outside of them.

So for his dissertation, he's comparing the way autistic kids from ages 3 to 6 learn from teachers, using the traditional lecture model, and when they use an interactive software program he's written.

Last fall, Travers' research received a boost from a $1,000 Doug Sperber Research Grant from the College of Education. It's named after a student who died weeks before he started his doctoral program. The university's Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders reviewed several proposals before selecting Travers for the grant.

Without the money, his dissertation would be far narrower in scope. He can glean all kinds of data from his software program, which provides basic lessons in the alphabet. But he has to collect data from classrooms, too. He's using the grant money to buy video cameras. Without them, he could monitor only a handful of students. With them, he can study 30 or 40, a far more meaningful sample.

Past studies show that multimedia learning benefits all children, but especially those with autism. "They typically have difficulty attending to important things going on around them," Travers says. "They also have a natural disposition toward computers, much more than when they're passive participants. No one really knows why."

It's taken Travers a long time to get to where he is. After graduating from Eldorado High in 1997, the Las Vegas native worked construction. "I wanted to do something more gratifying," he says. His mother's experience as a pediatric nurse led him to consider working with special-needs kids, and eventually to UNLV bachelor's and master's degrees. He then worked as a teacher with the Clark County School District.

The father of three can easily imagine parents with an autistic child running up monstrous debt paying for specialized care. He hopes his research leads to easily accessible teaching tools.