Serving highly vulnerable families in home-visitation programs

Home-visitation programs for families with young children are growing in popularity in the US. These programs typically seek to prevent child abuse and neglect and/or promote optimal development for infants, toddlers, and/or preschool-age children. This paper focuses on improving the capacity of home-visitation programs to meet the complex needs of highly vulnerable families with young children. Poverty, maternal depression and substance abuse, and domestic violence are noted as factors that place young children at risk for poor outcomes. The challenges of providing home-visitation services to families in which these risk factors are present are discussed. Family engagement, matching services to families’ needs, and staff capabilities are highlighted as areas in which improvements can be made to enhance home-visitation programs’ capacity to serve highly vulnerable families. Recommendations are given for improving the effectiveness of home-visitation programs in serving these families, as well for addressing policy and research issues related to the further development and evaluation of these programs.First author draf

Application of Algebra Curriculum-Based Measurements for Decision Making in Middle and High School

This article reports the results of a study examining the utility of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) in algebra for predicting performance on a state math assessment and informing instructional placement decisions for students in seventh, eighth, and tenth grades. Students completed six Basic Skills algebra probes across different time schedules and took their respective grade-level state math assessment. Using a dichotomous pass/fail variable based on whether students met grade-level proficiency, logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses were conducted to assess the CBM’s predictive validity. Rates of improvement (ROIs) were computed using the Tukey method to collect initial information on whether these measures would help monitor student progress. Finally, to determine whether these measures might inform instructional programming, a MANOVA using course assignment as the grouping variable and CBM, ROI, and state assessment performance as the dependent variables was conducted for the tenth-grade students. Results indicate that these measures show promise to predict which students might not meet grade-level proficiency standards as well as to determine whether students are progressing in the curriculum. Implications for practice are discussed