This EEF guidance report reviews the best available research to offer schools and teachers four recommendations to support parental engagement in children's learning. Parents play a crucial role in supporting their children's learning, and levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes. Evidence from our…

The purpose of this article is to critically review the literature on parent-implemented interventions aimed at promoting and enhancing the social and communicative behavior of young children with autism spectrum disorders. Twelve parent-implemented intervention studies that were conducted, at least in part, in home environments and were published…

This investigation documented how hearing-impaired adults (n=8) use communication repair strategies and attempted to change these strategies by communication therapy. Subjects practiced using alternative repair strategies when they did not correctly speechread a videotaped sentence. After therapy, subjects utilized the "repeat" strategy less and…

Intergroup dialogue (IGD), the focus of this monograph, is one of several dialogue and deliberation practices currently being used on college and university campuses in the United States. The introductory chapter introduces IGD, its historical roots, its location among similar diversity education practices, and its core components. The subsequent…

Twenty-one students with autism, ages 6-20, were taught to use facilitated communication to unlock their ideas and communicate through typing. Facilitated communication involves physical and emotional support for typing or pointing at letters, helping students maintain focus, and fading physical support. Subjects revealed unexpected literacy and…

In this study, functional communication training alone and combined with extinction and/or punishment was evaluated for four clients with severe retardation, behavior problems, and communication deficits. Results showed that the combination of training plus punishment produced the largest and most consistent reductions in target behavior problems.…

Evaluation of the interactive intervention model with mothers and young children (n=32) with developmental delays found that treatment mothers became more responsive and less directive and provided clearer linguistic models. Treatment children increased their use of vocal turns but did not make significantly greater improvement in overall…

This study assessed collateral effects during unstructured dinnertime family interactions of two different paradigms for training parents of 17 children with autism. One taught individual target behaviors serially, and the other taught the pivotal responses (PRT) of motivation and responsivity to multiple cues. Results suggested the PRT…

To illustrate the theoretical dynamics involved in analysis of the process of "metasensing," this paper investigates the language of 22 elementary school principals and their strategic actions during school improvement programs. The study's grounded theory approach frames the principals'"epistemology of practice"--thereby…

The role of the elementary school principal is critical in determining school effectiveness. This study analyzes the thinking and language of 22 "effective change" elementary school principals to discover common patterns in decisionmaking processes. The method of grounded theory delineates implicit theories principals use to make…