Is there less restraint and isolation of students after TCI quality improvement and fidelity assessment?

Cobo-Lewis and Kurtz tested the Quality Improvement and Fidelity Assessment Process (QIFAP) in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) at residential and school settings to see whether QIFAP was associated with a drop in restraint and isolation of students.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/ccids_posters/1066/thumbnail.jp

Picture vocabulary growth in students with and without disabilities in an early childhood program that targets poor families

We compared growth in the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test between children with disabilities and children without disabilities in Educare Central Maine, a highly resourced data-driven Birth-5 early care and education program that targets children at risk of school failure because of socioeconomic factors. Children with disabilities made up 13% of enrollment. Children with disabilities tended to catch up with the typically developing children as they spent more time in Educare.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/ccids_posters/1007/thumbnail.jp

Interdepartmental Coordination for Maine’s Young Children with Disabilities

Alan B. Cobo-Lewis describes Maine’s system of services for young children with disabilities. He notes that families of young children with disabilities face challenges in navigating Maine’s service structure. There can be delays before children get appropriate evaluation, and there are sometimes problems with inter-agency referrals. Cobo-Lewis makes a number of recommendations regarding data linkage; coordina­tion of eligibility determination from different funding streams; updating inter-agency agreements; and creation of a more efficient state departmental struc­ture for services to children with disabilitie

Equitable Vaccine Access within an Age-Based Framework

Objectives: When vaccine supply was limited, several states adopted age-based prioritization for Covid-19 vaccine eligibility because it is simple (especially when age is quantized by decade) and age is strongly associated with Covid-19 mortality. But this approach raises equity concerns based in law and ethics. I propose data-driven solutions for equitable policy within an age-based framework. Methods: Using CDC and Census Bureau data, I analyzed 538,627 U.S. Covid-19 deaths by age and race-ethnicity through February 2021 and compared the risk ratios to published data on risk ratios for other conditions. Results: Covid-19 mortality rose 2.56-fold per decade of life. Down syndrome, organ transplantation, and intellectual/developmental disability all have higher risk ratios. Conclusions: People with specific conditions associated with a risk ratio of 2.56 or 6.54 should become vaccine-eligible along with people 10 or 20 years older, respectively. Even as vaccines become more available, data collection and reporting through disability systems should be integrated with general public health systems, including vaccination databases, in order to assess Covid-19 mortality associated with intellectual or developmental disability per se and to make it possible to track vaccine progress in this marginalized population. People from these groups should also be involved in decision making and advisory bodies

Novel Methods for Maximizing and Evaluating Adaptive Measurement Efficiency

Contributions within Discipline: The findings have improved the efficiency of adaptive measurement in psychophysics, in experimental paradigms where individual trials are often information-poor and experiments are consequently long. The Bayesian adaptive methodology improves the information throughput in such experiments and improves on heuristic methods. The multivariate estimation also extends the utility of Bayesian adaptive estimation into realms where it is even more important because of the \u27curse of dimensionality\u27 (where the size of parameter space is exponential in the number of parameters). In addition, the work on nonparametric adaptive methods has helped reveal the source of bias in simpler adaptive methodology that has often incorrectly been taken to be safe because of its apparent lack of statistical assumptions. By revealint the source of such bias, it offers solutions for minimizing the bias

Final Syllable Lengthening (FSL) in Infant Vocalizations

Final Syllable Lengthening (FSL) has been extensively examined in infant vocalizations in order to determine whether its basis is biological or learned. Findings suggest there may be a U-shaped developmental trajectory for FSL. The present study sought to verify this pattern and to determine whether vocal maturity and deafness influence FSL. Eight normally hearing infants, aged 0 ; 3 to 1 ; 0, and eight deaf infants, aged 0 ; 8 to 4 ; 0, were examined at three levels of prelinguistic vocal development: precanonical, canonical, and postcanonical. FSL was found at all three levels suggesting a biological basis for this phenomenon. Individual variability was, however, considerable. Reduction in the magnitude of FSL across the three sessions provided some support for a downward trend for FSL in infancy. Findings further indicated that auditory deprivation can significantly affect temporal aspects of infant speech production

Profile Effects in Early Bilingual Language and Literacy

Bilingual children\u27s language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of profile effects, where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the distributed characteristic of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa

Phonological Translation in Bilingual and Monolingual Children

Bilingual children face a variety of challenges that their monolingual peers do not. For instance, switching between languages requires the phonological translation of proper names, a skill that requires mapping the phonemic units of one language onto the phonemic units of the other. Proficiency of phonological awareness has been linked to reading success, but little information is available about phonological awareness across multiple phonologies. Furthermore, the relationship between this kind of phonological awareness and reading has never been addressed. The current study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children\u27s ability to map one phonological system onto another. A total of 425 kindergarten and second grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. The results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Bilinguals translated real names more accurately than fictitious names, in both directions. Correlations between phonological translation and measures of reading ability were moderate, but reliable. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to evaluate phonological awareness through the perspective of children who live with two languages and two attendant phonemic systems

The Aging and Developmental Disabilities Networks: Can the Silos Be Dismantled?

The authors discuss the service networks for aging and developmental and physical disabilities, which have traditionally functioned in distinctly separate camps. They present the case for greater crossover between these networks and endorse increased alignment of the aging and disability networks in all arenas, including policy making, program development, education, and research

Computerized Adaptive Assessment of Infant-Toddler Language Development: Demonstration and Validation of an App for Screening

We have developed a computerized adaptive test (an app), based on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), that can rapidly gauge infant and toddler language development based on parent report. The app can be very useful in screening for developmental disabilities in IDEA Part C or Section 619. We will demonstrate the app and present validation data for toddlers.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/ccids_posters/1005/thumbnail.jp