Dale Walker

University of Kansas | KU · Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies

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...

The purpose of this study was to conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention for enhancing the language development of young children enrolled in home visiting programs. The participants were 59 children (18–30 months old) enrolled in one of three types of home visiting programs. Children's language skill...

The amount and quality of language-related interactions young children experience is related to their later development. The field has developed strategies to address this need, but in practice, parents rarely use them consistently or with high levels of fidelity. Given the need to modify such interventions so that they are used consistently and wi...

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...

Measures of young children’s social development are needed in the Multi-Tier System of Supports (MTSS) approach to early childhood. In 2004, we reported initial development of an observational measure of infants’ and toddlers’ social skills designed for early educators, the Early Social Indicator (ESI). Here, we report preliminary findings on the E...

Data-driven decision making (DDDM) helps educators identify children not responding to intervention, individualize instruction, and monitor response to intervention in multitiered systems of support (MTSS). More prevalent in K–12 special education, MTSS practices are emerging in early childhood. In previous reports, we described the Making Online D...

Children vary extensively in their language skills at school entry, and a substantial part of this variation is due to disparities in language exposure prior to school. Because these differences have continuing impact on academic, cognitive and social development, prevention and intervention programs have been developed to address deficits in early...

In this Special Issue we focus on highlighting intervention research addressing inequities in early language-learning experience that may place some children at a disadvantage later in school. Research over the last three decades has documented evidence for the differential amount and quality of children’s early language exposure, referred to as th...

Using data from 21 Educare schools, the researchers measured the rate at which children from birth to kindergarten-age enter the school and rate at which they exit the school. Educare schools are highly resourced Early Head Start/Head Start programs targeting children at risk, especially children from low-income backgrounds. About 10% of the childr...

Increasingly, measurement of child outcomes is becoming an international priority. However, the psychometric properties of standardized measures are rarely explored for populations beyond the country in which the measures were developed. The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure of infant-toddler expressive communication developed in the...

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a progress monitoring measure designed to support intervention decisions of the home visitors and early educators who serve infants and toddlers. The present study sought to add to the criterion validity claims of the ECI in a large sample of children using measures of language and preliteracy not previous...

Universal screening and progress monitoring measures are increasingly of interest to early interventionists who make decisions about the services provided to young children. A measure of infant-toddlers’ growth in early movement, the Early Movement Indicator (EMI), was reported in 2002. However, the EMI has remained an experimental measure based on...

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 langua...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Premises of the Developmental Intervention ModelFostering Prelinguistic Communication DevelopmentFostering Language Growth in At-Risk ChildrenConclusion AcknowledgmentsReferences

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...

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...

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...

Viewing data were reported every 3 months beginning at 6 months of age by the parents of 51 infants and toddlers. Viewing logs were coded for program, content, and intended audience. Using hierarchical linear modeling techniques, growth curves examining relationships between television exposure and the child's vocabulary knowledge and expressive la...

Proficiency in expressive communication is an important outcome in early childhood necessary for cognitive and social development. The development of an experimental measure for assessing growth in expressive communication in children from birth to 3 years of age is described. The measure was developed using general outcome measurement (GOM) proced...

Public expectations of accountability in our education system have increasingly focused on young children's development, in part because of Goal 1 of the National Education Goals (By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn). Few sensitive measurement systems have been developed, however, to monitor young children's g...

This study investigated the academic effects of classwide peer tutoring (CWPT) for students with mild mental retardation (MMR) and their typical peers in inclusive classroom settings. Four students with MMR were integrated in two, general education elementary classrooms during spelling instruction. Dependent measures included performance on weekly...

From 1983 to the present, 30 post-doctoral Fellows have spent at least one year at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project developing their own research plans, programs, and skills in research. Forty percent of these fellows were members of minority groups, 70% were female, and 1 had a disability demonstrating impact with traditionally underrepresen...

Enhancing children's communication: Research foundations for intervention. KaiserA. P. and GrayD. B. (Eds.). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes, 1993. Pp. 423. - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Dale Walker

Tested 3 alternative performance-based instructional models of academic achievement among 53 elementary school students longitudinally assessed from 1st–3rd grade (aged 5–8 yrs at initial assessment). Based upon constructs derived from a synthesis of prior experimental and descriptive studies, the models viewed growth in academic achievement as a f...

Early differences in family SES, child language production, and IQ were related to outcomes in early elementary school in the present prospective, 10-year longitudinal study. In a prior study of family interactional variables associated with language learning, major differences in parenting (i.e., time, attention, and talking) were found to be asso...

Application of Skinner's principles to socially significant human behavior had been well articulated by 1968 (D. M. Baer et al, 1968). Applications of these principles by Baer et al, R. V. Hall, B. Hart, E. R. Christopher, and their colleagues were in evidence as early as 1964 in the homes, schools, and clinics of inner-city Kansas City, Kansas, at...

The use of small group instructional formats with children who have autism and developmental disabilities has received mixed results in the research literature (Reid & Favell, 1984). The purpose of the two studies reported herein was to address this controversy by comparing the performance of students in one-to-one instruction to those transitioned...

The Juniper Gardens Children's Project has served as a community-based training site in the areas of applied behavior analysis, education, special education, human development, behavioral pediatrics/medicine, and organizational behavior management. Training activities have included (1) services to persons living within the community and (2) service...

Abstract Proficiency in expressive communication,is an important outcome,in early childhood necessary for cognitive and social development. In two studies, this manuscript reports the development of an experimental measure for assessing growth in expressive communication,in children birth to three years. The measure was developed using general outc...