A oro-ea PUBUCATION The passage of the Handicapped Children's Early Education Act (P.L. 90-538) prompted the creation of the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program in 1968. The goal of that program was to provide support for innovative programs for preschool-age children with disabilities and their families. With the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) in 1975, and, more recently, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, an increased number of exceptional children have access to placement in regular classrooms (Keogh & Levitt, 1976; McDaniel, Sullivan, & Goldbaum, 1982; Strain, Gable, & Hendrickson, 1978). These enactments paved the way for more students to be mainstreamed into educational environments that were less restrictive than those previously available.
A growing literature supports the view that early intervention programs are effective with children having various disabilities. The results of a number of investigations also suggest that the integration of such youngsters with normally developing peers can promote intellectual growth (Bricker & Bricker,In response to the literature supporting the efficacy of integrated preschool programs, as well as the benefits to normally developing peers as facilitators of language and social skills, the Small Wonders class was created in 1987 as an extension of services offered by the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center (DDDC) of Rutgers University. The program was established to provide a preschool environment for normally developing children and youngsters with autism. Committed to the goal of social integration, program staff developed experiences to promote educational progress and further mainstreaming into less restrictive settings.The Small Wonders class consists of six preschoolers with autism, eight normally developing peers, a special education teacher, three classroom assistants, and a clinical consultant. Children with autism are selected according to a number of criteria, including attending behaviors, language, social development, and preacademic skills. The students with autism all meet the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 1987) and have intelligence quotients in the moderate to normal range of intellectual functioning, as measured by the Stanford-Binet -IV (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986). The preschool program at the DDDC consists of three components: (a) the Prep class, a highly individual-FOCUS