Quality literacy instruction in preschool can be critical to the future academic success for all children, but may be even more so for children with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine progress in emergent literacy skills of young children with disabilities, compared with their typical peers, in an inclusive preschool setting.…

The purpose of this article is to describe what has been learned over the past 35+ years of research on the friendships of young children with disabilities. An extensive literature review was conducted to critically examine the purposes that guided the friendship studies, the methods used to measure friendships, and the major findings of these…

Generalizability and decision studies provide a mathematical framework for quantifying the stability of a given number of measurements. This approach is especially relevant to the task of obtaining a representative measure of communicative behavior in young children and supports an alternative to the debate regarding which type of assessment…

The purpose of this multiple baseline study across participants was to examine a narrative retell intervention with guided self-monitoring on narrative macrostructure skills in low-income African American young children at risk for language disorders. Three target 4-year-old children in a mixed-age kindergarten class of nine students participated…

Infants with visual impairment often require additional interaction from adults to reinforce behaviors that lead to competency at mealtimes, but parental and professional confidence in teaching these skills is often limited. In the following collective case study, the authors, a speech/language pathologist (S/LP), occupational therapist (OT), and…

This study examined differences in the quantity of child vocalizations (CVs) between preschool and home environments using the Language Environmental Analysis (LENA). The sample included monolingual English-speaking children (n = 27) and Spanish-English speaking dual language learners (n = 30). A two-way mixed effects analysis of variance with one…

The purpose of the current study was to characterize and compare the emergent-literacy skills, print interest, and home-literacy environment of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to their peers, as well as to examine the association between children's emergent-literacy skills and their home-literacy environment. Results indicated…

In this article we explore an effort to rethink curricular decision-making with a group of public pre-K teachers working in a context of curriculum escalation and commitment to play-based pedagogy. Through a professional development program designed to support developmentally and culturally responsive early mathematics, we examine how teachers…

This mixed methods study reports on the perspectives of 143 preservice early childhood educators (ECE) and 208 elementary teacher candidates (TC) on teaching children with developmental disabilities and delays (DDD) in inclusive classrooms. A questionnaire was administered which included items on demographic characteristics, experience, knowledge,…

Recent surveys have provided some guidance and recommendations for the student teaching component in early childhood teacher preparation, but specific information on the focus of supervision and evaluation of student teachers is limited. The current study surveyed 128 early childhood programs in 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate teaching effectiveness in an elective science course, in the Early Childhood Education Department of Athens University in Greece. For this, a sequential mixed research design was applied to investigate freshmen beliefs about the effectiveness of their future teaching in kindergarten. An enhancement and a…

As of May 2014, all candidates for teacher certification in New York State must successfully complete the teacher performance assessment (edTPA). This article describes an assignment piloted in an early childhood literacy class as an embedded signature assessment and has three goals: to explain the context that led to the development of the…

Decisions about how to support the development of young children's social competence must be made on the basis of knowledge of important competencies to be developed, as well as effective strategies to support those competencies. This paper combines a broad-definition model of components of social competence (Kostelnik, Stein, Whiren, Soderman, &…

The purpose of this paper is to present data demonstrating the differential pattern of association among play behaviors and developmental age that emerge for children with and without mental retardation across play situations. Seventeen preschool children with mental retardation and 17 preschool children without mental retardation were matched on…

Object box and environmental print card activities and kinesthetic/oral activities used in two before school programs for Title 1 students are presented for teaching phonological awareness concepts to students in primary grades. A small program evaluation study in which the two experimental groups made similar improvements and larger gains than a…