Mixed methods research (MMR) has the potential to be a powerful tool to expand the ways early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) scholarship understands and informs practice. Integration, or the purposeful combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches, is central for rigorous MMR. However, it can be…

Background: Education researchers typically estimate average program effects with regression; if they are interested in heterogeneous effects, they include an interaction in the model. Such models quantify and infer the influences of each covariate on the effect via interaction coefficients and their associated p-values or confidence intervals.…

Federal legislation and regulations addressing educational practices have provided clear mandates that educators when designing educational intervention use systematic decision-making processes to identify instructional strategies and methods that are evidence based. This study employed a survey to examine how familiar early interventionist/early…

Early interventionists may frequently encounter ethical dilemmas due to the complex nature of early intervention (EI) service delivery (e.g., EI system infrastructure and building and sustaining collaborative relationships within the system). Therefore, the purpose of this research study was to explore the experiences of EI professionals related…

Head Start is a national program that helps young children from families with low income get ready to succeed in school. It does this by working to promote their early learning and health and their families' well-being. The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) provides national information about Head Start programs and…

We conducted a multi-pronged investigation of different types of reporting bias in autism early childhood intervention research. First, we investigated the prevalence of reporting failures of completed trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov, and found that only 7% of registered trials were updated with results on the registration platform and…

This article outlines a stakeholder-created research agenda to guide future early intervention research for autistic children. We collaborated with 10 autism service providers, 10 parents of individuals with autism, and 10 autistic people across a total of 18 small group and 2 inter-group meetings occurring over 2 years. Together, we synthesized…

Understanding the relation between federal investment and research has implications for promoting science production in early childhood, a rapidly expanding area in education research and policy. Federally funded research has shaped fundamental issues in early childhood, yet few studies have systematically examined the relation between federal…

The current study adds to a growing body of behavioral research aimed at learning about changes in behavior over time. In this proof-of-concept study, functional analyses were conducted every 6-8 weeks with eight children diagnosed with ASD receiving early intervention services at a community-based clinic. The goal of this study was to develop a…

Exclusionary discipline practices differentially harm young children of color. As early childhood education systems seek to close these gaps to ensure all young children have access to high quality early learning experiences, the field requires more evidence-based approaches that can be scaled and replicated. Infant and early childhood mental…

Sensory over-responsivity in the vestibular domain (aka gravitational insecurity) has been frequently identified in the literature. However, little has been written about the effectiveness of interventions, especially in toddlers with these idiopathic challenges (e.g. without a diagnosis of autism). The objective of this pilot study was to test…

Addressing factors that make it more likely for families to attrite from early intervention trials will allow researchers to ensure that families reap the full benefits of participation. This study was an analysis of 78 children (Mage = 18.38 months, SD = 5.78) at risk for autism participating in a university-based randomized controlled trial of…

There has been significant and extensive knowledge production in the last four decades regarding pragmatic language impairment (PLI) in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The evidence contained in this literature, however, is contradictory. The present scoping review (ScR) seeks to disentangle competing explanations of conceptualizing,…

The field of special education has made great strides in identifying interventions that work. These practices have been described as evidence-based because they were effective across numerous studies. However, scholars in the field are also acutely aware that not all evidence-based practices will be equally effective for all children. Because of…

Research consistently shows that among young children, poor social skills and problem behaviors can lead to poor relationships with teachers and peers (Boivin et al., 1995), higher risk of academic failure (Buhs et al., 2006), and higher school dropout (Gilliam, 2005). Moreover, prekindergarten (PreK) and kindergarten (K) teachers report feeling…