Enriching home visiting services by incorporating scientifically-supported interventions is a means for improving their effectiveness in promoting child development. However, deliberate efforts to ensure that home visitors are fully knowledgeable and supported to implement interventions with parents of young children are necessary. In this experimental study, a randomly-assigned group of Early Head Start home visitors monitored the fidelity of their provision of a scientifically-based intervention, Little Talks, and the program's general child development services. On a biweekly basis, home visitors received performance feedback specific to their implementation of Little Talks and based upon the fidelity data. Findings demonstrated that home visitors showed immediate and consistent mastery of the Little Talks content, while the quality of their implementation, including their clinical decision-making and collaborative processes, improved to adequate levels over time. The Little Talks home visitors showed generalized improvements in their ability to obtain parent input while providing the program's typical child development services were detected. In fact, Little Talks home visitors' were superior in obtaining parent input relative to comparison home visitors. Further, parents for whom low-quality intervention implementation was observed discontinued their enrollment in home visiting prematurely, while high-quality implementation was associated with sustained enrollment. Limitations for this study are identified, leading to future directions for advancing home visitors' incorporation of evidence-based practices.

Salient early intervention approaches for children below the age of 3 years, such as home visiting, seek to strengthen the pivotal role that parents play in fostering their young children's early learning. Yet, measures that identify and monitor the ways in which low-income parents support toddlers' learning experiences are lacking. Without parent involvement measures for toddlers, evidence-based advancement of home visiting with regard to this key outcome is restricted. This study undertook a mixed-method approach to obtain perceptions of involvement behaviors from ethnic minority home visitors who were associated with a national home visiting program and to translate these perceptions into a meaningful, preliminary measure for children aged 2 and 3 years. Named the Parent Involvement in Early Learning scale, a statistical approach combining classical test and item response theories produced preliminary single dimensions of home-based involvement for the English and Spanish translations. This study is presented as a first step in raising awareness of parent involvement for this age group and directing future research.

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