The lockdown that was imposed by governments as part of the attempt to contain the COVID-19 pandemic included extreme measures, such as home confinement and the shutting down of special education systems. Our aim was to learn about the core experiences of parents of children with autism during this significant life disturbance. Thirty-one parents…

Introduction: Parenting children with intellectual and developmental disabilities can be stressful; however, families with religious beliefs may have positive ways of viewing their family. This study explored the associations between religious and spiritual involvement (RSI), family characteristics, parent mental health, and child adaptive and…

There are concerns about the quantity and quality of personnel in early childhood intervention (ECI) as the numbers of infants and young children with delays and disabilities grow in number, needs, and diversity. The Early Childhood Personnel Center (ECPC) was funded to provide technical assistance (TA) to state systems of ECI and institutions of…

Parents from individualist cultures (those focused on autonomy of individuals; that is, Australian) may view their autistic children differently compared to parents from collectivist cultures (where community needs are valued over an individual's, that is, South-East Asian cultures). As most research on autism and parenting has been undertaken in…

This research study investigated Palestinian mothers' perceptions about online learning due to the sudden shift to online learning under COVID-19. The study focuses on the time period: March 5, 2020 to August, 2020 before the new school year 2020/2021 began. The primary purpose was to reveal the challenges mothers of children in grades 1-4 faced…

An independent evaluation of an environmental science program that combined digital media with hands-on activities (called "Plum Landing") was conducted in 2020. The study included 32 families with six- to eight-year-old children. The evaluation assessed the extent to which the program was successful at promoting connectedness to nature,…

A retrospective review of initial early intervention and early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) evaluation reports was completed to identify practices specific to the evaluation of Latinx children's communication development. A records abstraction approach employed entailed a random selection of 294 EI/ECSE evaluation reports completed in…

Rural places are defined by their connectedness--close-knit, supportive communities that work together to meet the needs of children and families. But geographic isolation is another defining feature of rural places, one that often renders rural families invisible to nonrural Americans. Indeed, national conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic…

This article reports on Grade 2 teachers' perceptions of formative assessment in explaining the phenomenon of the underutilisation of formative assessment practices in mathematics teaching. A qualitative and interpretative case study investigated two Grade 2 teachers' enactment of formative assessment in priority schools in Gauteng. Data were…

Studies indicate thoughtfully planned chants integrated with shared book reading help young children remember concepts and vocabulary they hear in literature, capture children's imagination, develop their rhyming acuity, and background knowledge, and increase their sense of story structure, understanding of story sequence, phonological awareness,…

Background: Early childhood development (ECD) practitioners face tremendous challenges in supporting learners' development in English as an additional language (EAL). The lack of a formal ECD curriculum in South Africa exacerbates this challenge for African learners from historically disadvantaged backgrounds as there is a lack of guidance on how…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR…

Early intensive intervention has been shown to significantly affect the development of children with autism spectrum disorder. However, the costly implementation of such interventions limits their wide dissemination in the community. This study examined an integration of the Early Start Denver Model into community preschool programs for children…

This article describes the development and implementation of an integrated early childhood mental health and caregiver support program that uses a transdisciplinary approach to engage families and systems, maximize service efficiency, and ultimately create a next generation of safer families. A case example illustrates a family's journey through…

Research findings: This study explored the latent structure of socioemotional competence among Chinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong, China, developing and validating a culturally relevant, teacher-reported measure, the Chinese Inventory of Children's Socioemotional Competence (CICSEC). Cross-sectional questionnaire data were collected on two…