The Early Childhood Intervention Project: Building capacity for service delivery.

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to present the evaluation design and case study outcomes for 28 children from the first three years of the Ohio Early Childhood Intervention project (ECI). The ECI project was designed to help build the capacity of professionals for intervention design. Capacity building refers to preparing educational systems for change and, specific to this report, providing valid conceptual and procedural guidelines for early intervention. The foundations of the ECI project are ecobehavioral analysis, ecological consultation, and naturalistic intervention design. The acronym PASSKey (Planned Activity, Strategic Sampling, .Keystone behavior) describes three major aspects of the assessment-intervention guidelines. Validity evidence for the guidelines is based on single case quasi-experimental (accountability and case study) designs documented by comprehensive early childhood case portfolios. In addition, estimates were obtained of the consultants' time spent in problem solving.

Peer Micronorms in the Assessment of Young Children

“…The basic strategy involves having teachers identify &dquo;information-rich cases&dquo; (Patton, 1990, p. 169) through observation. The comparison children are carefully chosen based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the variables of interest to provide the most appropriate data for a particular assessment or intervention-related question (Barnett et al, 1997). The basic assumption that needs to be satisfied is that the selected children are prototypical and suitable for comparison purposes (Patton, 1990).…”

Evaluating Early Intervention

“…The ECI model, termed PASSKey, is based on ecobehavioral analysis (Rogers-Warren, 1984), ecological consultation (Gutkin, 1993), and naturalistic intervention design (Barnett, Bell, et al, 1997). The acronym PASSKey stands for Planned Activity, Strategic Sampling, and Keystone variable.…”

“…ECI consultants maintained daily logs of time spent in direct case-related activities for each portfolio (Barnett, Bell, et al, 1997). Beyond limited resources, the reason for the narrow cost analysis focus was our primary interest in professional role changes anticipating intervention-based service delivery (Reschly & Ysseldyke, 1995 Summarizing Outcomes Across Port folios Methods from meta-analysis and goal attainment scaling were adapted to summarize outcomes.…”

“…Third, outcomes for all of the cases were rated by project consultants and the principal investigator (Barnett, Bell, et al, 1997;Kiresuk, Smith, & Cardillo, 1994). Ratings were (I) complete (problems that led to the referral were resolved); (II) partial but on track (positive intervention results led to the next problem that needs to be resolved); (III) partial but limited (modest evidence for intervention effectiveness was found, but the intervention needs to be replanned or to be continued to meet the referral concern); and (IV) no evidence for positive intervention outcomes.…”

“…Thus, one of the ECI project's goals was to adapt and simplify intervention evaluation procedures so that they can be used by practitioners in field work. This report extends the database of the ECI project (Barnett, Bell, et al, 1997) through its fifth year to help answer questions of efficacy, acceptability, and practicality. In the cases reported earlier, the focus was on deriving replicable and valid procedures for consulting with parents and teachers.…”