The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of performance feedback on preservice teachers’ use of recommended practices within inclusive early childhood classrooms. A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to examine the relation between performance feedback delivered via email and practicum students’ use of target-recommended practices across settings and over time. Results indicate performance feedback delivered via email is an effective method for increasing practicum teachers’ use of target behaviors; however, generalization and maintenance varied across teachers. Implications for professional development and future research are discussed.
Programs serving infants and toddlers are expected to use child data to inform decisions about intervention services; however, few tools exist to support these efforts. The Making Online Decisions (MOD) system is an adaptive intervention that guides early educators’ data-based intervention decision making for infants and toddlers at risk for language delay. Using a cluster randomized design to test the effect of the MOD, home visitors (HVs) were assigned to either use the MOD or not across 13 Early Head Start programs. Both groups used the Early Communication Indicator (ECI) for progress monitoring and a parent-mediated language promotion intervention. Children from both groups demonstrated significant growth in expressive communication. However, children whose HVs fully implemented the MOD grew significantly more than the group that did not use the MOD, even after statistically controlling for parent and HV variables. Implications for designing effective and usable systems to promote the use of data-based decision-making practices by infant–toddler service providers are discussed, as well as limitations of the current study.
Early childhood experience is a social determinant of children's health and well-being. The well-being of young children is founded on their relationships and interactions with parents and family members in the home, caregivers, and teachers in early education, and friends and families in the greater community. Unfortunately, the early language experience of infants and toddlers from low-income families is typically vastly different than children from middle- and higher-income families. Hart and Risley (Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Brookes, Baltimore, 1995) described a "30 Million Word Gap" experienced by age four for children from poor families compared to economically advantaged families as measured by the number of words delivered by adults in the home to their children. This discrepancy between groups is associated with a deficit in vocabulary growth over time (Hart and Risley in Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Brookes, Baltimore, 1995; in The social world of children learning to talk. Brookes, Baltimore, MD, 1999; in Am Educ (Spring), 1-9. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1317532.files/09-10/Hart-Risley-2003.pdf , 2003), and readiness when they enter preschool and kindergarten compared to their more advantaged classmates. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a population-level public health prevention approach to research addressing the harmful impacts of the Word Gap. The approach includes use of evidence-based practices to improve children's language environments to foster their early language and literacy learning in early childhood. After a brief review of the Word Gap, we discuss four aspects: a conceptual framework, a community leadership team as driver of the local intervention, evidence-based language interventions for reducing the gap and promoting child language, and the measurements needed. Implications are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.