Charles R. Greenwood

University of Kansas | KU · Juniper Gardens Children's Project

Early childhood is an opportune time to begin teaching STEM, and preschool education provides the opportunity. How children experience and respond to STEM in community‐based preschools is our focus. Using the CIRCLE classroom observation system, we examined how frequently and in what contexts preschool teachers provided STEM learning opportunities,...

Engaging, focusing, and persisting in the completion of tasks are among the skills needed for school success. Tracking whether a child is learning cognitive problem-solving skills is essential in knowing if they are acquiring skills important for development and school readiness; and if not, how they are responding to early intervention. Use of the...

Despite evidence that frequent progress monitoring to identify children at-risk of delays and inform early intervention services improves child outcomes, this practice is rare in infant–toddler settings where children could benefit the most from early intervention. Using a descriptive research design within an Implementation Science framework, we e...

Children learn language through the interactions they have with their parents/caregivers beginning at birth. Hart and Risley (1995) discovered an inequity in the home language input children received from parents/caregivers. Children reared in low-income families received less input (conversations, turns) from parents than did children reared in mo...

Universal screening and progress monitoring are evidence-based practices in early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE). Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDIs) for infants/toddlers are measures that programs can use for universal screening, progress monitoring, intervention decision-making, and accountability. Prior...

Children’s engagement is an important construct often reported in Early Intervention and Early Childhood Special Education. However, its utility depends on its definition, measurement, theory of change, and empirical evidence. Our purpose is to discuss innovations in Children’s Literacy Engagement (CLE) and report empirical evidence demonstrating h...

A gap exists in the information needed to make intervention decisions with preschool children who are unresponsive to instructional intervention. Multi-Tiered System of Supports/Response to Intervention (MTSS/RTI) progress monitoring is helpful in indicating when an intervention change is needed but provides little information on what to change. Ec...

Despite much progress in improving the quality of preschool programs, there is still an uneven quality of instruction in early childhood settings. Providing support and professional development (PD) for teachers that is practical, systematic and sustainable is one potential avenue to increase classroom quality in preschool, including quality of lit...

Children's movement is an important issue in child development and outcome in early childhood research, intervention, and practice. Digital sensor technologies offer improvements in naturalistic movement measurement and analysis. We conducted validity and feasibility testing of a real-time, indoor mapping and location system (Ubisense, Inc.) within...

Combining digital sensor technologies offers vastly improved measurement of where adult and child speech occurs within the inclusive preschool classroom. Consensus in the literature indicates that the talk children hear is a driver of important school readiness outcomes, particularly for children with delays/disabilities. Advantages of sensors vers...

Purpose This research provided a first-generation standardization of automated language environment estimates, validated these estimates against standard language assessments, and extended on previous research reporting language behavior differences across socioeconomic groups. Method Typically developing children between 2 to 48 months of age com...

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 exp...

Purpose Children who do not develop early literacy skills, especially phonological awareness (PA) and alphabet knowledge, prior to kindergarten are at risk for reading difficulties. We investigated a supplemental curriculum with children demonstrating delays in these skills. Method A cluster randomized design with 104 preschool-age children in 39...

While response to intervention (RTI) is in widespread use in K–12 programs, it is still an emerging practice in programs serving preschool-aged children. In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences funded the Center on Response to Intervention in Early Childhood (CRTIEC): (1) to conduct a focused program of research to develop and rigorously evalu...

Increasingly, prekindergarten programs with literacy outcome goals are seeking to implement evidence-based practices to improve results. Such efforts require instructional intervention strategies to engage children as well as strategies to support teacher implementation. Reported is the iterative development of Literacy 3D, an enhanced support syst...

In 2013, Spencer, Goldstein, Sherman, et al. reported the promising effects of a supplemental, technology-assisted, storybook intervention (Tier 2) containing embedded instruction targeting the oral language learning of preschool children at risk for delays. We sought to advance knowledge of the intervention by replicating it in a new sample and ex...

Purpose We investigated a small-group intervention designed to teach vocabulary and comprehension skills to preschoolers who were at risk for language and reading disabilities. These language skills are important and reliable predictors of later academic achievement. Method Preschoolers heard prerecorded stories 3 times per week over the course of...

This poster session presents a study using verbal input (i.e., adult and peer vocalizations) to identify the degree to which young children with/at-risk for developmental disabilities (DD) were included in an inclusive classroom. Data was collected using technologically advanced speech-recognition (Language ENvironmental Analysis [LENA] system) and...

A psychometric evaluation of Ubisense in the preschool classroom will be presented in this poster session. In addition, we present feasibility data on the verbal input a child with a developmental delay received over a school day.

Understanding the language environments of early learners is critical in facilitating school success. Increasingly large scale projects (e.g., Providence Talks, Bridging the Word Gap) are investigating the language environments of young children in an attempt to better understand and facilitate language acquisition and development. The primary tool...

Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) is beginning to be implemented in preschool programs to improve outcomes and to reduce the need for special education services. The proportions of children in programs identified as struggling learners through universal screening have important implications for the feasibility...

The prevalence of struggling readers by third grade nationwide is estimated at one in three. Reports trace the roots of this problem to early childhood and the opportunity to learn language and early literacy skills at home and in preschool. Reports also indicate that one-size-fits-all preschool language and literacy instruction is beneficial for o...

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure for universal screening, intervention decision-making, progress monitoring for infants and toddlers needing higher levels of support, and program accountability. In the context of the ECI's long-term wide-scale use for these purposes, we examined the invariance of ECI measurement in two samples o...

Children with emotional and behavioral disorders (E/BD) struggle to achieve social and academic outcomes. Many studies have demonstrated self-management interventions to be effective at reducing problem behavior and increasing positive social and academic behaviors. Functional behavior assessment (FBA) information may be used in designing effective...

Preschool experience plays a role in children’s development. However, for programs with language and early literacy goals, the question remains whether preschool instructional experiences are sufficiently effective to achieve these goals for all children. In a multisite study, the authors conducted a process-product description of preschool instruc...

Peer tutoring is an instructional strategy that involves students helping each other learn content through repetition of key concepts. This meta-analysis examined effects of peer tutoring across 26 single-case research experiments for 938 students in Grades 1-12. The TauU effect size for 195 phase contrasts was 0.75 with a confidence interval of CI...

Schoolwide Response to Intervention (RTI) services are growing in prevalence in U.S. schools. Most advanced are RTI programs in elementary schools, with preschool and secondary education programs beginning to discuss, develop, and experiment with schoolwide RTI. At its heart, RTI seeks to account for individual differences in student learning succe...

The purpose of this article is to describe guidelines for reporting and reviewing findings from studies and to provide guidance to authors seeking to report results of research on measurement and the development or evaluation of assessment procedures or instruments in early intervention (EI) and early childhood special education (ECSE). Following o...

Measurement in early childhood is an increasingly large-scale endeavor addressing purposes of accountability, program improvement, child outcomes, and intervention decision making for individual children. The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making for infants and toddlers, including response to int...

We investigated Early Head Start home visitors’ use of evidence-based practices and the efficacy of a web-based system to support these practices. Home visitors learned to use 3 evidence-based practices: (a) frequent assessment of children's early communication for screening and progress monitoring, (b) 2 home-based language-promoting interventions...

We investigated Early Head Start home visitors’ use of evidence-based practices and the effectiveness of a web-based system to support these practices. Home visitors learned to use 3 evidence-based practices: (a) frequent assessment of children's early communication for screening and progress monitoring, (b) 2 home-based language promoting interven...

Seeking to achieve greater effectiveness in educating the nation's youth, the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach is increasingly being implemented in US schools (Berkeley, Bender, Peaster, & Saunders, 2009; Walker & Shinn, 2010). The approach is a paradigm shift in K–12 education that is affecting early education, early intervention, and early...

The purpose of this research was to replicate and extend some of the findings of Hart and Risley using automatic speech processing instead of human transcription of language samples. The long-term goal of this work is to make the current approach to speech processing possible by researchers and clinicians working on a daily basis with families and...

In the last two and half decades, much has been learned about conceptualizing and developing measures for use by practitioners designed to inform their intervention decision making, such as when a child would benefit from receiving additional instructional support (universal screening) and whether the child is responding positively to the intervent...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide information about the two most widely used, evidence-based peer-mediated approaches, ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) and Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). General information about both approaches and why both approaches strengthen student outcomes at the classroom level of instruction are provided....

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making and progress monitoring for infants and toddlers. With increasing recognition of the importance of quality early childhood education and intervention for all children, measurement plays an important role in documenting children’s progress and outcomes of e...

In this article, the authors discuss ways ecobehavioral assessment (EBA) has contributed to greater understanding of students’ response to instructional intervention and its relationship to academic learning and achievement. EBA represents a proven effective way to conduct a contextual analysis of the instructional environments, teacher and student...

Progress monitoring and data-based intervention decision making have become key components of providing evidence-based early childhood special education services. Unfortunately, there is a lack of tools to support early childhood service providers’ decision-making efforts. The authors describe a Web-based system that guides service providers throug...

This study matched 15 kindergarten and 1st-grade retained students in 7 schools with their promoted peers on grade-level literacy performance. Researchers collected literacy assessments, demographic information, and instruction dosage data. Retained kindergarten students received less intervention and did not benefit academically from retention. Pr...

1982) to the present, the editors and authors of this issue traced the historical precedence of treatment integrity in psychology (see Yeaton & Sechrest, 1981) and its emergence in edu-cation. They reviewed existing treatment in-tegrity frameworks and reported common and unique differences in an effort to focus on common and unique features. The sp...

Children living in poverty are 1.3 times as likely as non-poor children to experience reading difficulties and lack key oral experiences that contribute to early literacy development. The purpose of this research was to study the effects of viewing commercially available educational television with closed captions. Seventy second- and third-grade e...

Learning to read is founded on the acquisition of oral language, phonological processing, print awareness, knowledge, and comprehension skills acquired before school entry. Practitioners who work with very young children have limited means of knowing whether interventions in these areas are helping children make progress toward important language a...

The majority of research on the efficacy of ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) is based on research with urban elementary students (), with much less research in middle schools. This study investigated CWPT with 975 middle school students in 52 classrooms, grades 6 through 8, over a three-year period. A mixed design combining features of both group (in...

This article describes the implementation of small-group reading instruction as secondary- and tertiary-level components of a three-tier model of prevention and intervention. The study consisted of 83 students who were targeted in the winter of kindergarten as being at high risk for reading failure. Intervention consisted of evidence-based curricul...

Progress monitoring tools have been shown to be essential elements in current approaches to intervention problem-solving models. Such tools have been valuable not only in marking individual children's level of performance relative to peers but also in measuring change in skill level in a way that can be attributed to intervention and development. A...

ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) is an evidence-based instructional strategy effective with students with and without disabilities. The evidence for efficacy is strong with respect to students in elementary schools learning basic academic skills in classrooms with large teacher-pupil ratios, and relatively less strong for students in secondary school...

This experimental/comparison study of secondary-level, small-group instruction included 318 first- and second-grade students (170 ELL and 148 English-only) from six elementary schools. All schools served high numbers of ELL students with varying school SES in urban and suburban communities. Experimental schools implemented a three-tier model of int...

Policy decision makers, early educators, and early interventionists face numerous challenges as they develop and implement statewide accountability systems to evaluate and improve children's early intervention and early childhood special education outcomes. Kansas was an early adopter of the Child Outcomes Summary Form (COSF) developed by the Early...

A single-subject reversal design with counterbalanced phases across two classrooms was used to measure the effects of peer tutoring on the retention and generalization of spelling words in two third-grade general education classrooms. The results revealed that the mean pretest-posttest gain scores during all the peer tutoring phases of the two clas...

Effectively scaling up evidence-based educational practices requires identification of barriers to the wide-scale implementation and maintenance of such practices at a distance from the original research and development team. The two studies reported here investigated the implementation of ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) in nine schools across five...

Proficiency in problem solving is an important outcome in early childhood necessary for cognitive and emotional development. The development of an individual growth and development indicator of problem solving for children 1 to 4 years of age is described. Based on the general outcome measurement approach (Deno, 1997), the measure is intended for u...

Few evidence-based instructional practices achieve large-scale use, often remaining only in the schools directly involved in their development. Research on scaling up effective educational practice often lacks sensitive measures of the practice's implementation and the required research protocol. This article describes how we used rate of implement...

The Early Childhood Outcomes (ECO) Center was funded by the Office of Special Education Programs to promote the development and implementation of child and family outcome measures for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with disabilities. An evidence-based process with extensive stakeholder input led to the identification of five outcomes by which...

Early interventionists are accountable for the progress of children receiving their services. Technically adequate measures of the progress of individual children are needed. While the Early Communication Indicator (ECI) for infants and toddlers is one such measure, data to support its use are limited to a single research report. In this manuscript...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of computer and information technology in scaling up research-validated instructional strategies like ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT). Recently, implementation software, the CWPT Learning Management System, web and e-mail communications, and interactive multimedia resources have been developed to sup...

T his article presents a set of quality indicators for experimental and quasi-experimental studies for the field of special education. We believe there is a critical need for such a set of indicators, given the current focus on the need for an increase in rigorous, scientific research in education. Recently, the National Re-search Council (NRC, 200...

A multiple baseline design across three parent-child dyads of families with multiple risk factors was used to determine the effectiveness of teaching parents to use milieu language teaching procedures. Parents were taught to use two sets of milieu language teaching skills: responsive interaction and incidental teaching. Results showed that parents...

Recent advances concerning emerging/beginning reading skills, positive behavioral support (PBS), and three-tiered schoolwide prevention models combined with federal mandates (i.e., IDEA and No Child Left Behind) have stimulated interest in providing early and intensive instructional intervention services to children at risk for reading and behavior...

The usability of classroom interventions plays a significant role in the likelihood that they will reach wide scale use. The current report describes the usability testing of a software application designed for ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT), a research-based classroom intervention. Initially, CWPT teachers rated the usability of the software and i...

Proficiency in social interaction with adults and peers is an important outcome in early childhood. The development of an experimental measure for assessing growth in social skills in children birth to 3 years is described. Based on the general outcome measurement (GOM) approach (e.g., Deno, 1997), the measure is intended for use by early intervent...

Does viewing Between the Lions, an educational television series featuring literacy instruction, improve the emergent literacy skills of kindergarten and first-grade children? Do improvements vary as a function of the child's initial reading risk status? In this study, higher word recognition and standardized reading test scores were noted for all...

This study applied an early screening approach to determine the risk status of children in five urban schools and monitor their patterns of reading growth over 3 years. A majority of students were from culturally diverse and low-SES backgrounds.Two validated instruments were used for determining (a) academic risk (the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Ea...

This study investigated the multiyear effects of a school-wide implementation of evidence-based literacy practices and a program to prevent early reading failure in one elementary school. Guided by a collaborative partnership/professional development model, the researchers hypothesized that teachers would implement and sustain their use of a range...

This article has no abstract

This article presents empirical data using The Ecobehavioral System for the Contextual Recording of Interactional Bilingual Environments to examine the instructional context, teacher behavior, and academic engaged behavior for English language learners at risk for developmental disabilities in general education and bilingual special education progr...

Measuring children’s fluency learning a new skill is a component of applied behavior analysis of long standing. In special and general education programs in elementary schools today, fluency measurement can be seen as Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), and in preschool and kindergarten programs as Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skill (...

Proficiency in movement, an important outcome in early childhood, is necessary for physical, cognitive, and social—emotional development. The development of an experimental measure for assessing growth in movement in children ages birth to 3 years is described. Based on general outcome measurement (GOM) procedures (e.g., Deno, 1997), the measure wa...

Classroom behaviors that enable academic learning are the focus of this article. A brief perspective is offered on the development and validation of one enabler-engagement in academic responding-and recent findings are provided of an effort to bridge the gap between research and practice by employing this knowledge in Title 1 elementary schools to...

Science governs how impressively effective disciplines, such as medicine and engineering, work, how they make decisions, how they collaborate, and how they are regulated by professional and other public and private organizations. Science, and the production of trustworthy empirical evidence, plays a central role in advancing the production of new k...