This study investigated the support and benefits of early intervention (EI) in families with children with special needs. Data were gathered through a written questionnaire, "Family Benefits Inventory," completed by 126 families with children with special needs supported by EI teams, with ages from six months to six years in Portugal.…

In "How Is Testing Supposed to Improve Schooling," Haertel describes seven broad mechanisms whereby testing is used to improve schooling (this issue). The first four are direct mechanisms, meaning that "test scores are taken as indicators of some underlying construct and on that basis scores are used to guide some decision or draw some…

The Miami Lighthouse, in its 81 years of service to persons who are visually impaired (that is, those who are blind or have low vision), has adapted to meet the ever-changing needs of clients of all ages. To meet the significant needs of visually impaired children--more than 80% of early learning is visual (Blind Babies Foundation, 2012)--the…

Disabilities in a child may lead to low self-esteem and social problems. The lives of parents and siblings are also affected. Early intervention may decrease these consequences. To promote early intervention early referral to adequate resources is essential. In a longitudinal retrospective observational study it was found that children with…

Screening brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) is a clinical intervention empirically linked to reductions in substance usage. However, less is known on how to effectively train social work students on SBIRT. This study examines the impact of a SBIRT training administered to BSW and MSW students (N=228) at the University of…

About 13 percent of children aged 3 through 21 enrolled in public schools received special education services in school year 2015-16, and about 3 percent of children from birth through age 2 received special education services. Concerns about the difficulties identifying and evaluating children for special education have been raised by the media,…

"Children's Budget 2019" is a comprehensive analysis of how kids and families have been faring in the federal budget over the past five years. The book captures and analyzes historical funding data and spending trends across a wide range of policy areas including child welfare, early childhood, education, health, housing, income support,…

The purpose of this study was to examine early mathematical skill differences among preschool children in US Head Start classrooms. Latent class analysis based on six early mathematical subtest scores (i.e. counting aloud, measurement, counting objects, numbers and shapes, pattern recognition, and grouping) from a sample of 279 Head Start children…

Often certain types of toys are considered more appropriate either for boys or for girls to play with. Therapists often use toys to engage children in intervention activities to promote skill development. This study investigated the gender stereotype perspectives of children's toys held by adults who were and were not parents. Fifty-two…

Universal screening is increasingly becoming part of prevention and early intervention best practice in schools. Although the number of schools engaging in universal screening has increased over the past decade, emotional and behavioral problems are often their primary focus. Problem-focused screening, however, does not address positive…

Fluency and rate-based assessments, such as curriculum-based measurement, are frequently used to screen and evaluate student progress. The application of such measures are especially prevalent within special education and response to intervention models of prevention and early intervention. Although there is an extensive research and professional…

This study examined the classroom writing environment in 31 Head Start classrooms, and explored the relations between the writing environment, children's (N = 262) name-writing, and children's letter knowledge using pathway analysis. Our analyses showed that Head Start classrooms provided opportunities (i.e., writing materials and teachers'…

The analyses presented in the Technical Report, "Which Centers Participate in Head Start or Public Pre-Kindergarten" characterize centers that have at least one child whose enrollment is funded through Head Start or Public Pre-K funds. This supplement to the technical report provides interested readers with technical details of the…

Learning analytics offers insights into student behaviour and the potential to detect poor performers before they fail exams. If the activity is primarily online (for example computer programming), a wealth of low-level data can be made available that allows unprecedented accuracy in predicting which students will pass or fail. In this paper, we…

We used mixed methods to examine differences in the early writing development of children, identified as at risk of literacy difficulties, in the context of Reading Recovery (RR). From an extant dataset of 24 children, we identified those who made fast progress (n = 6) and those who did not (n = 8). We studied change over time in the sources of…