High-quality preschool lays the foundation for a child's educational career. Preschool is where children are learning how to self-regulate, make friends, communicate, and express their wants and needs while preparing for their educational career within the K-12 system. If children do not have the behavioral and social-emotional skills needed to…

In a context where more than 1,000,000 American adolescents are processed by juvenile courts annually and approximately 160,000 are sent to residential placements, this paper examines "what works" and "what doesn't work" in reducing the criminal behavior of juvenile offenders and presents examples of government initiatives that have successfully…

Young people who are leaving the foster care and juvenile justice systems often experience a difficult transition to adulthood that is characterized by a number of troubling outcomes, including poverty, low levels of education and employment, and housing instability. While some services are available for these populations, there is little evidence…

This report examines issues concerned with the use of aversive behavior modification techniques in actual treatment practices at one intermediate care facility for the mentally retarded. The review of these practices reveals how, once the philosophy of using aversives takes hold at a program (to deal with seemingly intractable behaviors), its…

The study examines the status of behavioral management services for disabled persons in Alberta, Canada, and offers recommendations regarding alternative service delivery models for the Northwest Region of Alberta. Existing systems are addressed in terms of centralized service models, outreach service models, and combined residential and outreach…

Research methods are tools that can be variously applied - depending on the stage of knowledge in a particular area, the type of research question being asked, and the context of the research. The field of program evaluation, critical for social policy development, often has not adequately embraced the full range of methodological tools needed to…

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul has had great influence on contemporary thought about the role of science and technology in the emerging global society. His books "The Technological Society" (1954) and "The Technological System" (1980) characterize the new social context as a tightly interlocked global technological system…

The problem is well known to every parent of a teenager, every high school teacher, every clinical practitioner, and every social policy maker: vulnerable adolescents risk becoming more deviant through association with deviant peers and peer groups. Deviant peer influences are among the most potent factors in the development of antisocial…

The National Research Council formed a Committee on Educational Interventions for Children with Autism and charged the committee with integrating the scientific, theoretical, and policy literature and creating a framework for evaluating the scientific evidence concerning the effects and features of educational interventions for young children with…