We investigated whether three interventions -- studying incorrect worked examples, studying correct worked examples, or receiving feedback -- improved children's 0-1,000 (Experiment 1) and adults' 1 thousand--1 billion (Experiment 2) number-line estimation precision relative to a no intervention control group. At pretest, participants estimated…

Preschool-age children identified as at risk for later reading difficulties can benefit from supplemental, small-group emergent literacy intervention. As such interventions become commercially available and marketed to preschool programs, it is important to understand their impacts when implemented by intended end users under routine conditions.…

This study examines the efficacy, cost, and implementation of an integrated science and literacy curriculum for kindergarten. The study was conducted in a large urban district and included 1,589 students in 71 classrooms in 21 schools. The research includes a multi-site cluster-randomized controlled trial and mixed-methods cost and implementation…

Problem/Purpose: Young children with developmental speech and/or language impairment (DSLI) often fail to develop important oral language and early literacy skills that are foundational for subsequent schooling and reading success. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the efficacy of the TELL curriculum and associated evidence-based…

Previous studies have often compared and contrasted differences among media presentations, including traditional storybooks and videos and their potential for incidental word learning among preschoolers. Studies have shown that children learn words from a variety of media, and that repetition is an important source for incidental learning. Yet, to…

Preschoolers can learn vocabulary through shared book reading, especially when given the opportunity to predict and/or reflect on the novel words encountered in the story. Readers often pause and encourage children to guess or repeat novel words during shared reading, and prior research has suggested a positive correlation between how much readers…

Disruptive behavior problems frequently emerge in the preschool years and are associated with numerous, long-term negative outcomes, including comorbid disorders. First Step is a psychosocial early intervention with substantial empirical evidence supporting its efficacy among young children (Walker et al., 2014). The present study reports on a…

This study investigated the influence of teaching letter names and sounds in isolation or in the context of storybook reading on preschool children's early literacy learning and engagement during instruction. Alphabet instruction incorporated paired associate learning of correspondences between letter names and sounds. In Decontextualized…

The current study reports the results of a randomized controlled trial examining the impact of the Getting Ready parent engagement intervention on young children's social-emotional competencies and the quality of the student-teacher and parent-teacher relationships. Participants were 267 preschool-aged children and their parents, as well as 97…

Although basing instruction on learning trajectories (LTs) is often recommended, there is little direct evidence regarding the premise of a LT approach--that instruction should be presented (only) one LT level beyond a child's present level. We evaluated this hypothesis in the domain of early shape composition. One group of preschoolers, who were…

Objective: There are currently no empirically-supported, comprehensive school-based interventions (CSBIs) for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) without concomitant intellectual and language disability. This study compared outcomes for a CSBI (schoolMAX) to typical educational programming (services-as-usual [SAU]) for these children.…

The advancing social-communication and play (ASAP) intervention was designed as a classroom-based intervention, in which the educational teams serving preschool-aged children with autism spectrum disorder are trained to implement the intervention in order to improve these children's social-communication and play skills. In this 4-year, multi-site…

Models are central to the practice and teaching of science. Yet people often fail to grasp how scientific models explain their observations of the world. Realizing the explanatory power of a model may require aligning its relational structure to that of the observable phenomena. The present research tested whether "relational…

Background: With rates of autism diagnosis continuing to rise, there is an urgent need for effective and efficient service delivery models. Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) is considered an established treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, there have been few well-controlled studies with adequate sample size. The aim of this study…

Policymakers face dilemmas when choosing a policy, program, or practice to implement. Researchers in education, public health, and other fields have proposed a sequential approach to identifying interventions worthy of broader adoption, involving pilot, efficacy, effectiveness, and scale-up studies. In this paper, we examine a scale-up of an early…