In 2022-23, SRI Education conducted an evaluation of a pilot implementation of the Maine Early Childhood Consultation Partnership® (ECCP®) for Maine's Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Child and Family Services. Created and developed by Advanced Behavioral Health, Inc., ECCP® is an evidence-based, manualized model of infant and…

Interventions to enhance cognitive and executive function performance are essential for the child's performance in current and future occupations. Occupational therapy practitioners are critical members of early intervention, education, and healthcare teams. Practitioners are distinctly qualified to address cognitive functioning within the context…

Universal autism screening is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics at 18 and 24 months. However, many children are not identified until after the age of 4 years, and some not until adulthood, either due to mild or no indication of symptoms early in development, or to co-occurring conditions which may overshadow autism symptoms. This…

Child's crying is the stimuli serving the development of a child-parent relationship through evoking child-oriented and parent-oriented parental reactions. Individual differences in parental reactions to crying have been partly explained by parental and child's temperament. We conducted two studies to verify the predicting effects of temperamental…

Universal screening and progress monitoring are evidence-based practices in early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE). Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDIs) for infants/toddlers are measures that programs can use for universal screening, progress monitoring, intervention decision-making, and accountability.…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

Congenital heart disease (CHD), the result of structural changes to the heart present at birth, is the most common congenital birth condition. As survival rates for infants with complex CHD have increased in recent years, risk for neurodevelopmental challenges has also increased. Early referral to developmentally supportive care is recommended as…

Research indicates that the early years are a pivotal time for developing foundational mathematical knowledge, and that early experiences with mathematics have a lasting impact on later numeracy skills and academic achievement. However, the importance of early mathematical thinking and learning is often undervalued or overlooked in early childhood…

Aistear: The Early Childhood Curriculum Framework, was launched in Ireland in 2009. The framework is applicable in all settings where children in the 0-6-year range are present; this includes all early years settings and the first two years of primary schools, referred to as "infant classes" in the Irish context. This article shares the…

This study examined the relationship between young children's cognitive development and fathers' engagement in early childhood. The study examined fathers' home engagement patterns based on literacy, play, and caregiving activities when their children were 9-month-old and these patterns of engagement in 9-month-old were related to children's…

Low birth weight (LBW) and prematurity have been identified as health risks associated with adverse developmental and educational outcomes. This study examined whether such risks affected children's receiving special education services. Using a nationally representative sample from the Pre-Elementary Educational Longitudinal Study, we investigated…

This study investigated the feasibility of recruiting and assessing infants with prodromal autism characteristics in the first year of life via telehealth. Participants included 41 infants (Mage = 10.51 months, 51.2% female, 80.5% White) whose parents had concerns about social communication delays or autism. All infants met concerns criteria on a…

The present study aimed to investigate the communicative characteristics of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and their mothers in interaction, whether and how they differ from those of mother-child dyads with normal hearing, and whether mother and child influence each other over the first year after implantation. Eighteen Italian-speaking…

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a "developmental cascade" for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the…

Drawing on experiential learning and transformative learning theory, a transformative model of continuing professional development (CPD) was employed to implement symbolic gesturing in a day nursery. The model of CPD aimed to empower practitioners working with infants to have autonomy over their professional learning. Perspectives of the nursery…