Individual contingency management systems have been used successfully to improve behaviors in school settings--including preschools--but often come with associated challenges in time and personnel management. Group contingencies, in the form of independent, interdependent, and dependent contingencies, have been used in preschools to address these…

Functional living skills are skills needed for being an independent individual in society. As individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) get older, the discrepancy between functional living skills of themselves and their peers increases. However, it is not known which type of intervention is more or less effective specifically for adolescent-…

Given the continued changes in demographic diversity of students in the United States, it is important to ensure that participants included in special education research reflect the diversity of the classroom. We examined 16 years of intervention research across 12 special education journals to evaluate the extent to which diverse student…

Recent research supports the benefit of students' construction of relevance through writing about the connection of content to their life. However, most such research defines relevance narrowly as utility value--perceived instrumentality of the content to the student's career goals. Furthermore, the scope of phenomenological and conceptual…

African American men have high rates of chronic disease morbidity and mortality associated with their low rates of fruit and vegetable consumption. In an effort to inform tailored behavioral interventions for this demographic, we sought to assess if men with healthier eating practices viewed their environment differently than those who ate less…

The purpose of this literature review is to describe intervention research studies in which paraprofessionals received training applicable to student with disabilities. Thirty studies were systematically reviewed to identify (a) characteristics of study participants and settings, (b) characteristics of paraprofessional training and…

Uganda is recognised as an early success story in the HIV epidemic at least in part due to an open and vigorous national dialogue about HIV prevention. This study examined the national discourse about HIV, AIDS, and young people in New Vision, Uganda's leading national newspaper between 1996 and 2011, building from a previous archival analysis of…

Purpose: Most studies of adherence use a single global measure to examine the relation of adherence to outcomes. These studies inform us about effects of overall implementation but not about importance of specific program elements. Previous research on the Strengthening Families Program 10-14 has shown that outcomes were unrelated to global…

Parents of children with significant externalizing and internalizing behavioral problems habitually report greater parenting stress compared to parents of children without these challenges. One avenue to alleviate parenting stress and ameliorate youth outcomes is youth mentoring, which includes a supportive adult paired with a child with the…

Objective: Premature discontinuation from therapy is a widespread problem that impedes the delivery of otherwise effective psychological interventions. The most recent comprehensive review found an average dropout rate of 47% across 125 studies (Wierzbicki & Pekarik, 1993); however, given a number of changes in the field over the past 2 decades,…

This study used qualitative methods to evaluate the perceptions of parents, educators, and school administrators in three large, urban school districts (Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Rochester) regarding services for children with autism spectrum disorder within the context of limited district resources. Facilitators followed a standard…