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.…

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.…

Despite much progress in improving the quality of preschool programs, there is still an uneven quality of instruction in early childhood settings. Providing support and professional development (PD) for teachers that is practical, systematic and sustainable is one potential avenue to increase classroom quality in preschool, including quality of…

The purpose of this research was to replicate and extend some of the findings of Hart and Risley using automatic speech processing instead of human transcription of language samples. The long-term goal of this work is to make the current approach to speech processing possible by researchers and clinicians working on a daily basis with families and…

Measurement in early childhood is an increasingly large-scale endeavor addressing purposes of accountability, program improvement, child outcomes, and intervention decision making for individual children. The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making for infants and toddlers, including response to…

We investigated Early Head Start home visitors' use of evidence-based practices and the efficacy of a web-based system to support these practices. Home visitors learned to use 3 evidence-based practices: (a) frequent assessment of children's early communication for screening and progress monitoring, (b) 2 home-based language-promoting…

The paper proposes a methodological expansion in evaluation research--an eco-behavioral approach. Implications of using the eco-behavioral approach in the evaluation of preschool programs for the disabled are discussed. This methodology is said to allow both determination of early intervention effectiveness and specification of factors responsible…

Policy decision makers, early educators, and early interventionists face numerous challenges as they develop and implement statewide accountability systems to evaluate and improve children's early intervention and early childhood special education outcomes. Kansas was an early adopter of the Child Outcomes Summary Form (COSF) developed by the…

Few evidence-based instructional practices achieve large-scale use, often remaining only in the schools directly involved in their development. Research on scaling up effective educational practice often lacks sensitive measures of the practice's implementation and the required research protocol. This article describes how we used rate of…

Among the results, it was suggested that teacher ranking of students' verbal interaction frequencies was the best means of screening. (Author/DLS)

This article discusses forces affecting the advance of technology-based assessment in special education, noting the improved quality achieved through merger of assessment methods and electronic technology including networking, expert systems, authoring software, and multimedia. It notes, however, that the potential of technology-based assessment…

This report describes research and development activities concerned with developing a set of tools for planning interventions for individual children, birth to age 8. It is part of a 5-year project to develop a comprehensive system of assessment within a decision-making framework for programs serving children with and without disabilities, birth…

This report describes the decision-making model that provides the theoretical framework being developed by the Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth and Development (ECRI-MGD) in a 5-year project to generate a set of common child and family indicators that can be used within a comprehensive system of service delivery for young…

Thirty-six English language learners at-risk for developmental disabilities were observed for six days within 4 elementary schools and 26 classrooms. The most frequently taught subjects were math, reading, and language arts. English was the most frequently used language of instruction and students engaged in academic behaviors 44% of the time.…