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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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Publications
Publications (66)
Educators have struggled to implement research-based practices effectively, particularly in early childhood settings where data-driven decision making (DDDM) is important for guiding practice. Implementation of DDDM is hindered by a lack of progress monitoring assessments, guidelines for how to use data to inform intervention decisions, and profess...
Purpose
This study aims to examine caregiver perceptions and use of the Early Communication Indicator–Autism (ECI-A), an adapted, naturalistic assessment to measure progress on communication skills, and explore differences across racial and ethnic groups to provide preliminary data about the cultural responsiveness of the newly adapted ECI-A.
Meth...
Purpose
We sought to conduct a pilot investigation of the reliability and administration fidelity of a new play-based measure of social communication for infants and toddlers with an autism diagnosis.
Method
Our team adapted an existing measure, the Early Communication Indicator (ECI), for use with young autistic children in clinical and research...
Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in children. The preschool classroom is a rich language environment for monitoring and ensuring growth in young children by measuring their vocal interactions with teachers and classmates. Early childhood researchers are naturally interested in analyzing...
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,...
Observational approaches may limit researchers' ability to comprehensively capture preschool classroom conversations, including the use of wh-words. In the current proof-of-concept study, we present descriptive results using an automated speech recognition (ASR) system coupled with location sensors to quantify teachers' wh-words by preschool teache...
Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in pre-school children. Early childhood researchers are interested in analyzing naturalistic versus controlled lab recordings to assess both quality and quantity of such communication interactions between children and adults/teachers. Unfortunately, pres...
Children with ASD, particularly those living in rural areas, have limited access to effective interventions, such as those based on applied behavior analysis (ABA). The Online and Applied System for Intervention Skills (OASIS) training is designed to address that need by increasing parental ABA knowledge and implementation skills. A waitlist contro...
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...
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ABSTRACT
Daily interactions of children with their parents are crucial for spoken language skills and overall development. Capturing such interactions can help to provide meaningful feedback to parents as well as practitioners. Naturalistic audio capture and developing further speech processing pipeline for parent-child interaction...
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ABSTRACT
Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) is a light weight audio capture device commonly used to monitor language including frequency of parent-child interactions for research purposes. However, various factors including price and technical limitations often limit the use of LENA for low-income families. Using a smartphone can...
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ABSTRACT
Assessing child language and communication skills in naturalistic settings requires a motivating framework for adults and children to interact. Book reading is widely used by parents to interact with children, providing parents opportunities to engage children in conversation and practice communication skills. Recordings o...
Monitoring child development in terms of speech/language skills has a long-term impact on their overall growth. As student diversity continues to expand in US classrooms, there is a growing need to benchmark social-communication engagement, both from a teacher-student perspective, as well as student-student content. Given various challenges with di...
A supportive environment is vital for overall cognitive development in children. Challenges with direct observation and limitations of access to data driven approaches often hinder teachers or practitioners in early childhood research to modify or enhance classroom structures. Deploying sensor based tools in naturalistic preschool classrooms will t...
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...
The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated a challenge in early intervention that the field has struggled for decades to adequately address: How do we implement evidence-based practices remotely while maintaining fidelity for the vast array of early intervention services? This is the core question that investigators sought to address in this Special Issue o...
Adult-child interaction is an important component for language development in young children. However, such development varies based on the quality and quantity of these conversations. Teachers responsible for the language acquisition of their students have a vested interest in improving such conversation in their classrooms. Advancements in speech...
While technology-based interventions enhance instruction and improve outcomes for students with disabilities, implementing and integrating technology in authentic learning environments continues to be a challenge. Based on the experiences of a variety of Stepping-Up Technology Implementation projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Offi...
There is a well-documented lack of service providers trained to provide early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) to the growing number of families who have a child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although several states have begun offering service providers EIBI training to increase local capacity to provide EIBI services, ther...
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...
Few, if any, reliable and valid screening tools exist to identify language delay in young Spanish–English speaking dual-language learners (DLLs). The early communication indicator (ECI) is a brief, naturalistic measure of expressive communication development designed to inform intervention decision-making and progress monitoring for infants and tod...
One of the earliest indicators of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is delay in language and social communication. Despite consensus on the benefits of earlier diagnosis and intervention, our understanding of the language growth of children with ASD during the first years of life remains limited. Therefore, this study compared communication growth pat...
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...
For children with normal hearing (NH), early communication skills predict vocabulary, a precursor to grammar. Growth in early communication skills of infants with cochlear implants (CIs) was investigated using the Early Communication Indicator (ECI), a play-based observation measure. Multilevel linear growth modelling on data from six ECI sessions...
The Bridging the Word Gap Research Network conducted a review of literature to identify effective interventions to facilitate the communication development of young children in hopes of identifying ways to reduce the well-documented word gap among children associated with socio-economic class. As part of this effort, we focused on the ways in which...
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...
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...
The untapped potential of mobile applications to increase opportunities for parent engagement is enormous. Parent engagement is widely recognized as critical for children with disabilities, and optimal for children who are considered at risk for delayed development. However, there are many barriers to parent engagement. Mobile technology provides a...
The present paper takes a translational approach in applying the themes of the current special section to prevention and intervention science in Latino families. The paper reviews the current literature on cultural processes in prevention and intervention research with Latino families. Overall, many prevention and intervention programs have either...
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...
Families in rural or remote areas have limited access to evidence-based intervention for their children with autism. Using web-based training and telemedicine technology, the current study investigated the feasibility of training seven parents to implement Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) strategies with their children with autism. In this explorato...
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 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...
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...
There are major obstacles to the effective delivery of mental health services to poor families, particularly for those families in rural areas. The rise of Internet use, however, has created potentially new avenues for service delivery, which, when paired with the many recent advances in computer networking and multimedia technology, is fueling a d...
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...
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...
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 authors developed and evaluated an online foster parent training system designed specifically for low-bandwidth Internet connections and individuals with limited Internet/computer experience. After preliminary onsite evaluations, a 2-week field test was conducted to evaluate the following dimensions: foster parents' pre- to post-test scores on...
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...
children with autism, the num-ber of people who are properly trained to deliver such treatments fails to meet the demand. Thus, many families and schools cannot provide their children with adequate treatment (see box, "What Does the Literature Say About the Incidence of Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorders?" and Figure 1).This article describes a l...
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...
We compared online study guides to pen-and-paper study guides in terms of academic performance, the amount of time instructors spent grading study guides, and student preferences. Students in 3 sections of a child psychology course used online study guides (n = 46), and students in 3 other sections used pen-and-paper study guides (n = 64). Instruct...
This study examined the effects of three different types of computer feedback on the following variables in a Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) course: unit quiz and final exam performance, the amount of time tutors and other teaching staff spent answering student questions, and students'' preference for each type of feedback. The feedback c...
Despite the often reported benefits of educational technology, educators often find it difficult to integrate these applications and devices into typical school practices. Although there are a number of complex factors and interactions that contribute to this problem, the usability of educational technology is rarely considered. The current paper d...
