This article is based on findings drawn from a large-scale study aimed at mapping barriers to education in the context of social disadvantage. The research sites focused on in this paper are: one early childhood facility, four primary schools and the communities of these learning centres. Participants included learners, teachers, caregivers and…

This book brings together distinguished scholars, community college practitioners, and emerging leaders to expand upon existing theories, provide reflection on practice, and demonstrate the dynamic nature of community college internationalization. There is a special challenge for United States community colleges to move from selected international…

The purpose of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and Head Start Collaborative programs is to share the responsibility for closing the achievement gap between economically-disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers. Currently, HISD collaborates with the following four federally-funded Head Start agencies that serve regional…

Different beliefs exist about the ability of individuals with mental retardation to recognize certain social roles or relationships appropriate for the acquisition of critical skills for successful social development. In particular, a major social skill is conversational proficiency. The purpose of this study was to look at the concept of…

Music, as an expressive art, plays a significant role in the lives of all children and it can be used in education to improve non-musical educational objectives as well as the musical ones. Music has also positive contributions to the development of children with special needs in terms of feeling the sense of achievement, giving self confidence,…

The factor structure and agreement among commonly used questionnaires for identifying children at risk for developmental disability and autism spectrum disorders between the ages of 36 and 66 months were studied. The Age and Stages Questionnaires (ASQ), the Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social Emotional (ASQ: SE), and the Social Communication…

The increase in individuals and students being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been significant in recent years, and teachers are finding themselves needing to work with students for which they may be inadequately prepared. More and more parents of children with ASD are concerned with the education programming and preparedness…

Elucidating how inequity aversion (a tendency to dislike and correct unequal outcomes) functions as one develops is important to understanding more complex fairness considerations in adulthood. Although previous research has demonstrated that adults and children reduce inequity, it is unclear if people are actually responding negatively to…

From the moment infants are born, they seem to prefer orienting to social stimuli, over objects and non-social stimuli. This preference lasts throughout adulthood and is believed to play a crucial role in social-communicative development. By following up a group of infants at the age of 6, 8, and 12 months, this study explored the role of social…

This study examined the social impact of being a typical peer model as part of a social skills intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants were drawn from a randomized-controlled-treatment trial that examined the effects of targeted interventions on the social networks of 60 elementary-aged children with ASD.…

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) holds promise as an idiographic approach for measuring outcomes of psychosocial interventions in community settings. GAS has been criticized for untested assumptions of scaling level (i.e., interval or ordinal), inter-individual equivalence and comparability, and reliability of coding across different behavioral…

The goal of this study was to utilize a phenomenological case study design to investigate the individual and social identity development of an adolescent male who had been placed in a high-security group home setting. The participant had been identified with emotional disturbance (ED), and 48, XYYY karyotype. The participant described his social…

Identity development and separation-individuation in parent-child relationships are widely perceived as related tasks of psychosocial maturation. However, a dynamic, developmental perspective that explains how intra-personal change in identity evolves from transactions between parents and children is not sufficiently represented in the literature.…

A randomized control trial comparing two social communication treatments for children with autism spectrum disorder examined the effect of treatment on object interest. Thirty-two children, 18-60 months, were randomly assigned to the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) or Responsive Education and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching (RPMT)…

The extent to which early social communication behaviors predict later communication and intellectual outcomes was investigated via retrospective video analysis. Joint attention, imitation, and complex object play behaviors were coded from edited home videos featuring scenes of 29 children with ASD at 9-12 and/or 15-18 months. A quantitative…