Reviews research that indicates the need to increase support for in-home care for infants with special needs, to examine the impact of current family leave regulations on infants with special needs in low income families, and to develop service delivery models that support early development across appropriate contexts. (Author/CR)

This article summarizes how an organization designed and implemented a quality improvement infrastructure and an effective outcomes-based management system. Stages included: assessing the organization's current status and planning for buy-in, initiating data collection, ensuring data integrity, utilizing data in clinical assessment and…

This position paper proposes an expanded definition of transition, based on common components of early childhood and secondary perspectives. It advocates for a seamless model of transition service delivery for students with disabilities, including program planning, from birth through age 21. The model addresses curriculum, location of services,…

A three-year summers-only master of arts degree program in speech language pathology (SLP) at New Mexico State University allows speech language pathologists working in rural schools to obtain their master's degree and fulfill state waiver requirements. Program addresses educational needs of nontraditional graduate students and improves the…

Describes a statewide project in Connecticut that attempted to meet the training and support needs of childcare providers as they included greater numbers of children with disabilities into their programs. The Training for Inclusion Project emphasized family-centered practices, transdisciplinary team process delivery, and developmentally…

Introduction: Tremendous advances in health care have been made through the development of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Studies show that physicians face barriers in practice, preventing the effective use of the best evidence available. Insight into these barriers should pave the way for an action plan to remove them. The aim of this study was…

The Veterans Health Administration (VA) provides a case study for linking performance measurement, information technology, and aligned research efforts to facilitate quality improvement in a large, complex health system. Dialogue between clinical researchers and VA leaders occurs through structured activities (e.g., the Quality Enhancement…

Background: Disadvantaged communities are increasingly the target for interventions. Sure Start was launched in England in 1999 to tackle child poverty and improve child and family services, with Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) targeted at relatively small areas of marked deprivation. However, they are located in a range of different types of…

Although much research in the 1960s and 1970s was devoted to cross-cultural issues such as expatriate employment, researchers moved away from doing cross-cultural research in order to direct their efforts toward the hot topics of the time. However, the past few decades have seen an exponential increase in the globalization of our economy, and this…

Educational administrators are spending considerably more time and effort on issues involving special services for disadvantaged and special needs students than they have in the past. In light of current school improvement initiatives to improve the academic success for all students, it is likely that this will even increase. Passage of No Child…

There is an ever present struggle associated with reconciling "primary" care requirements for children and young people living in group care programs with "secondary" organizational demands imposed by external agency expectations and administrative requirements. That struggle finds its expression and potential balance in the daily work of staff.…

The introduction of an online learning management system (LMS) raises a number of complex issues involving institutional responses at various levels to the adoption and diffusion of technological change. Issues include those related to governance, management and technical support, as well as to core learning and teaching matters associated with…

This study was designed to evaluate the use of asynchronous discussion in distance education in terms of student perceptions of its value for learning and for affective support. At the end of the third and sixth years of a distance delivered teacher education programme, students completed a survey to determine the extent to which the nature and…

The growth of distance education options at the postsecondary level has led to a need to reassess how student services are provided to distance learners. This study used qualitative thematic analysis to examine the experiences of student service directors in Canadian postsecondary institutions when providing counseling and advising services to…

National legislation that increased the role of accountability testing has created pressure to use testing data, along with other data, for instructional decision-making. Connected to this push for data-driven decision-making, is the increased interest in data delivery systems or Management Information Systems (MIS) in education. But, before…