Quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) is important for young children's holistic healthy development. As ECCE scales, contextually relevant and feasible measurement is needed to inform policy and programs on strengths and areas for improvement. However, few measures have been designed for use across diverse contexts. Drawing on…

Although language samples are child-friendly and well-suited for obtaining global measures of language production, structured protocols have the potential to elicit many different exemplars of language structures in a shorter amount of time. We created a structured elicitation protocol, the Sentence Diversity Priming Task (SDPT), to efficiently…

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of a need for a general, non-language-specific assessment tool that could be used to evaluate general speech and language abilities in children, especially to assist in identifying atypical development in bilingual children who speak a language unfamiliar to the assessor. It has been suggested…

A primary purpose of early childhood education and interventions is to promote children's acquisition of knowledge and skills linked to later social competence and academic success. In this report, special attention is given to summarizing what has been learned about early childhood classrooms as contexts for development and learning, the kinds of…

This article describes a case study in the use of the Family Check-Up (FCU), a family-based and ecological preventive intervention for children at risk for problem behavior. The FCU is an assessment-driven intervention that utilizes a health maintenance model; emphasizes motivation for change; and offers an adaptive, tailored approach to…

The Saginaw Prekindergarten program for educationally disadvantaged children is designed to provide 4-year-old children with an environment that will enable them to develop skills needed for future success in school. The process evaluation conducted in 1995 consisted of an on-site, half-day classroom observation at 8 of the 15 prekindergarten…

This report evaluates the influence of five language programs on the learning of children in year-round Head Start programs. It presents the statistical analysis and design of an investigation conducted in ten classrooms in two sites (Henderson, North Carolina and Vero Beach, Florida). The core of the programs was the Buchanan Readiness in…

The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate two procedures for providing preschool education for rural 4-year-olds by using a mobile laboratory. The project used "readimobiles" to determine the effectiveness of a structured, psycholinguistically-based preschool curriculum on black, disadvantaged children. There were three…

A study was made to determine whether a structured language program for 2-year-old educationally disadvantaged children and a complementary structured language program for their mothers would significantly affect the language behavior of mothers and children. Twenty-four lower socioeconomic status mothers and their 2-year-olds were placed in the…

This paper presents encouraging results concerning speech perception, speech production, and language evaluation for an initial group of five children implanted with cochlear implants under the age of three years at the Children's Cochlear Implant Centre in Sydney, Australia. Preoperative assessment procedures and postoperative management are…