Reviews literature on the effectiveness of the Head Start program, with emphasis on the Westinghouse report and the long-term follow-up studies of the Consortium on Developmental Continuity. Discusses the conflict between the child educative and parental development goals of Head Start. Concludes that social competency and significant minority…

Defines Peer Helping as umbrella term covering variety of services and activities in various settings with diverse populations. Describes peer helping program and its purpose, training, supervision, and evaluation. Discusses benefits to youth of peer helping program (sense of individuality, ability to make friends, and participation in meaningful…

Classifies school-based prevention activities into the following five educational domains: (1) cognitive; (2) affective/interpersonal; (3) behavioral; (4) environmental; and (5) therapeutic. Discusses research findings for each domain. (Author/LHW)

In the Washington State juvenile justice system, serious or repeat offenders receive the full panoply of due process rights and procedures, with the exception of jury trials; minor offenders are diverted to community boards that require community service or victim restitution; and status offenders are removed from the courts' jurisdiction and…

Reviews twelve experimentally-designed longitudinal studies of infant education programs. Suggests that the more intense programs, those that had more hours of contact with children and included parents and children, had more positive intellectual effects on the children, parent behaviors, and family life circumstances. (KH)

Summarizes major ideas of articles in special issue on infant intervention programs. Describes current assumptions about infant stimulation, differences between programs based on the populations they serve, and research findings on the efficacy of infant stimulation. Assesses the future of infant intervention. (KH)

This article describes efforts to develop measurement instruments that can be used to evaluate outcomes of a variety of stuttering treatment approaches by measuring changes in speakers' affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions to stuttering, effects of stuttering on functional communication abilities, and the impact of stuttering on quality…

The Child Support Enforcement Amendments of 1984 require that every state not qualifying for a waiver appoint a commission to look at the success of the state's child support enforcement program in securing support and parental involvement for all children needing such services, whether they were eligible for public assistance or not. This…

This document presents an executive summary concerned with drug use in the schools. The introduction outlines the dimensions of the problem and the prevalence of drug use among adolescents. A section entitled "What Works" reports on the state-of-the-art drug prevention program which involves the social influence/resistance skills technique. Four…

This study addressed concerns of Pennsylvania legislators and government departments by examining coordination between education and other human service agencies in three program areas: early intervention (for preschool handicapped children); student assistance (for drug and alcohol abuse and other teenage problems); and teenage pregnancy and…

Describes Being in Charge, a guidance unit designed to provide intermediate and middle-grade children with the skills to cope more effectively with taking care of themselves while home alone. Discusses format of the sessions, objective and content for each of the six sessions, and evaluates the program as implemented with fifth and sixth graders…

Child advocates have succeeded in getting child abuse recognized as a serious social problem requiring governmental response. Ironically, this success now threatens the viability of child abuse programs: 65 percent of all reports are ultimately dismissed. This flood of unfounded reports violates parental rights and overwhelms the limited resources…

At the request of the U.S. House of Representatives, this study identified problems confronting child protective service (CPS) units, which affect the system's capacity to protect children from abuse and neglect. State and local responses to these problems, and opportunities for the federal government to assist in improving the system's capacity…

This booklet presents summaries of the proceedings of five workshops held at the U.S. Department of Education that discussed strategies for improving urban schools. The first section contains materials from a workshop on the New Haven School Intervention Project, an elementary school effort designed to aid black and disadvantaged children. In the…

Examines the recent history of early childhood intervention efforts; discusses principles that guided the formation of intervention programs in the 1960s and 1970s; describes the Head Start program and lessons learned from its development; considers issues in evaluating intervention programs; and presents suggestions for future directions in early…