Topics in Early Childhood Special Education

The contributions of three variables—children's receptive vocabulary scores, maternal responsiveness, and maternal directiveness—to the prediction of Verbal IQ and reading over a 5½-year period were investigated. The study sample consisted of 543 low-birthweight children who were participants in the larger Infant Health and Development Program. Three separate multiple regression analyses found that children's receptive vocabulary scores at 36 months of age accounted for the major portion of the variation in the outcomes. Maternal responsiveness added significantly to the variation in each of the three models. The results suggest that the responsiveness of the mother is an important variable to consider when an intervention target is enhancing the verbal ability of a child.

An AB single-subject design replicated across five participants was used to assess the effects of an intervention that taught parents to support their preschool children's communication skills and manage their behavior. Children with language delays and emergent behavior problems and their parents from low-SES backgrounds participated. Parents attended 30 individual sessions and were taught to be responsive to their children's communication and to provide contingent consequences for their children's behavior. Generalization to interactions at home and maintenance of intervention efforts were assessed. Parents learned the strategies, generalized these strategies to interactions at home, and maintained positive changes 6 months after the intervention. Children showed positive changes in language and behavior during the intervention, but maintenance and generalization of these effects were more variable.

Practitioners' personal perspectives may serve as a lens through which they reject practices that do not match their beliefs or filter the ways in which new practices are interpreted and implemented. The perspectives of 241 multiple-discipline early intervention practitioners were elicited by asking them to describe "three wishes" they would make to change early intervention so that children and families received quality services. Their statements were transcribed and categorized into six major themes: (a) work environment, (b) services, (c) teaming, (d) training, (e) center-based service models, and (f) parent participation. With few exceptions, practitioner perspectives conflicted with accepted early intervention best practices such as family-centered intervention or provision of services in natural environments.