The Shaping Futures Together agenda highlights policies and investments that families and practitioners say will ensure all children thrive. This playbook provides recommended policy and research strategies that Start Early believes will help to realize those priorities. Each section includes legislative and administrative policy recommendations…

Authentic assessment is a growing alternative to conventional testing. This research-to-practice article describes a framework for implementing authentic assessment. The R-E-A-L framework shows how roles, equipment, assessment tools, and location can be incorporated into early childhood practices.

Infants who are born prematurely may experience developmental delays and impairments during infancy and beyond. Those who are born at extremely low birthweight face the greatest challenges. Many families could benefit from early intervention services through their local Part C of Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) programs, but…

This final report summarizes the objectives, activities and outcomes of a federally funded program that was designed to provide parent training and early intervention services to children and families in 4 counties of north Alabama. A total of 61 children were enrolled in the project over three years. All were less than 36 months of age and had…

This final report describes the activities and outcomes of a federally-funded program designed to meet the needs of high risk hearing impaired children with multiple handicaps from 0-2 years of age--a population not served at the time by local, state, or federal programs. The project's hypothesis was that the initiation of a "total…

The 24th annual report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is organized into four major sections. Section 1 is on context/environment and includes four modules that address special education teacher quality (from the Study of Personnel Needs in Teacher Education (SPeNSE)); costs of special…