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Coaching has received attention in early childhood education, early intervention, and family science. In the home visiting field, coaching is a distinct professional development tool to improve home visitor effectiveness in meeting the complex needs of families, improve child development outcomes, and meet home visiting field priorities (e.g., home visitor recruitment, retention, and training). Home visitors dually serve in roles as coachees when receiving professional development and as coaches for the families with whom they work. This article focuses on the roles of home visitors as coaches and as coachees. We explore justifications for coaching, models of coaching, the timing of coaching, being recipients of coaching, and the delivery of coaching to recipients. This paper underscores the complexity involved in coaching in the home visiting field and the need for further research to develop a framework and procedures for coaching best practices. Using our exploration of home visitors as coaches and coachees, we propose implications for higher education.

Modular treatment designs enable interventionists to adapt intervention content to individual clients, a process referred to as individualization. Little is known about individualization processes and its effects on outcomes in early childhood services. This exploratory study investigated individualization processes undertaken by Early Head Start home visitors as they provided Little Talks, a modularized book-sharing intervention for families. It also examined the effect of individualization on parent involvement in early learning activities. Two indicators of individualization were calculated in this study: (a) the proportion of change in the Little Talks' lessons sequence and (b) the pace of delivery. Findings showed that most home visitors individualized Little Talks, with the most frequent change being the repetition of lessons. Exploratory regression analysis showed an inverse relationship between home visitors' individualization behavior and parent involvement, highlighting the need to examine the quality of individualization. Implications for advancing the implementation and study of individualization processes in home visiting are discussed.

The Head Start Program Performance Standards (HSPPS) have mandated that Early Head Start (EHS) programs implement coaching experiences for education staff (§ 1302.93, ACF 2016). Therefore, coaching in EHS with the home visitor-as-coachee warrants further attention. Despite multiple calls for coaching home visitors, there remains a lack of research on the delivery of coaching. In this study, five home visitors from one Early Head Start-Home-Based Option (EHS-HBO) site participated in coaching. All participants each completed seven (and one participant completed eight) individualized coaching sessions across 4 months for a total of 36 coaching sessions. Of these, 15 sessions were analyzed (beginning, middle, and end sessions for each home visitor). Guided by transformative learning theory and coaching phases in the extant literature, the aim of this study was to examine the processes that took place within individual sessions and across time. Results show that home visitors accomplished their goals and that there were variations within processes, including reflective thinking, questioning, and supportive talk.

Collaborative goal setting among home visitors and family members is a mandate for Head Start's home-based program. Yet, a dearth of research is available for advancing evidence-based practices for setting and monitoring home visiting goals or for understanding how family characteristics or program features are associated with them. With the intent of stimulating empirical attention to this pivotal objective in Head Start's home-based program, this study explored a home-based Head Start program's routine practices for identifying and monitoring goals. In addition, the interrelationship of demographic characteristics and home visiting frequency with goal activity was examined. Findings from this explorative study indicated that goal identification occurred for slightly more than half of the families. Additionally, goals were largely adult focused. Goal attainment occurred at a low frequency. For the most part, family demographics were unrelated to goal activity. However, higher home visiting frequency was associated with increased goal setting. Emanating from this study are implications for practice as well as for future research. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

Inner-city schools located in high poverty communities often operate with insufficient resources to meet the educational needs of students. Community residents serving as paraeducators offer the dual benefits of expanding instructional capacity and fostering family-school relationships, provided they are appropriately prepared and incorporated with professional staff. This paper introduces a community partnership model for preparing members of the local community to serve as paraeducators and for fostering their working partnerships with professional school staff. A theoretical rationale demonstrating the significance of this model for students from low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds is presented, and key elements in establishing it are discussed. The application of the community partnership model for preparing paraeducators is illustrated through a case example, the Reading Partners program. Future directions to empirically advance the community partnership model are presented. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

Teacher self-efficacy (TSE) changes according to context. Limited research has been conducted to understand how TSE can vary in relation to student characteristics or the student-teacher relationship (STR) in preschool. The aims of the current study were to 1) examine student-specific TSE variability among monolingual English-speaking and Spanish-speaking dual language learners (DLLs) and 2) examine the extent to which STR quality moderates the relationship between student language and student-specific TSE. Results demonstrated that when controlling for closeness in the STR, teachers felt higher levels of student-specific TSE in the domains of instructional support and student engagement for English-speaking students versus DLLs. However, teachers reported equal levels of student-specific TSE in the domains of behavior management and emotional support irrespective of student language. Secondly, STR quality did not significantly moderate relationships between language and student-specific TSE. Limitations and future research directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although home visiting is growing as a service for families with young children, the field does not adequately prepare the home visiting workforce, and higher education courses on home visiting are rare. Many home visitors are prepared through higher education as teachers, social workers, or nurses, which provides knowledge but few of the skills needed to collaborate with families to support their children's development, revealing a need for focused pre-service preparation for home visiting. We conducted a qualitative study to (1) describe the present state of preparation in higher education and (2) propose recommendations for strengthening home visitor preparation via higher education. Focus groups (N = 43) were conducted at conferences that included some focus on early childhood home visiting. Individual interviews (N = 11) were conducted parallel to focus groups. Participants were faculty and administrators in higher education or home visiting related professionals. Using thematic analysis, three major themes surfaced: (1) learning, training, and awareness in higher education; (2) blending of a myriad of skills in home visiting; and (3) unification and support needs. Our findings emphasize the need for higher education to provide professional preparation for careers in home visiting. We offer recommendations to meet this need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological theory of human development and Moll's theory of funds of knowledge, the aim of this qualitative study was to examine the beliefs of parents and early childhood teachers on (a) the language development of Spanish-speaking preschool dual language learners (DLLs) and (b) how they can collaborate to support DLLs. Parents (n = 14) and early childhood teachers (n = 17) of Spanish-speaking DLLs participated in focus groups and interviews. Data were analysed using the consensual qualitative research method [Hill, C., Thompson, B., & Williams, E. (1997). "A guide to conducting consensual qualitative research." "The Counseling Psychologist," 25, 517-572]. Nine themes emerged about parents' and teachers' beliefs about DLLs' language development, and three themes emerged about parent-teacher collaboration. Findings indicate several practice implications, such as a need for education about second language acquisition and development of sustainable models to form collaborative partnerships between parents and teachers.

The purpose of this study was to develop a book sharing intervention to support the language development of infants and toddlers from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Low-income parents were engaged in a collaborative inquiry to develop "Little Talks." Parents were assigned to three small groups that independently participated in intervention iterations. Iterations were sequenced so that qualitative data collected during the preceding iteration were analysed to inform modifications to refine the subsequent intervention. Book sharing interventions were administered through eight home visits by members of the research team. Starting with Dialogic Reading, qualitative data highlighted needs to produce an intervention that met a range of parental preferences and that was flexible in meeting parents' readiness to acquire new strategies. Little Talks emerged as an intervention that fostered multiple approaches to book sharing by forming and delivering book sharing strategies according to parents' preferences and needs.

This quasi-experimental study examined expressive vocabulary outcomes for Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP) toddlers, after one year of home-visiting services. First, this study applied Rasch modelling to establish the construct validity and reliability of a widely used expressive vocabulary measure, as modified for a sample of ethnic and linguistic minority toddlers. Following, between-groups differences in expressive vocabulary were examined for PCHP children and comparison children who were similar in socio-economic status, age, and neighbourhood residence. Indication of larger expressive vocabularies for PCHP children, relative to comparison children, reflected the benefits of one year of home visiting. Effect sizes for English- and Spanish-speaking subsamples of PCHP and comparison children showed that Spanish-speaking children experienced the greatest growth. Although promising findings emerged, this study highlights methodological limitations that should be improved in order to advance empirical demonstration of the impact of home visiting on children's expressive vocabulary outcomes.

Given the growing numbers of Latino children entering the U.S. educational system, there is a need to understand the ways Latino parents support their children's early education. However, tools used to measure family engagement have been developed primarily with middle-income, English-speaking European American families in the United States. The present study builds upon prior empirical work with the Family Involvement Questionnaire-Early Childhood (FIQ-EC), a multidimensional scale developed for use with culturally diverse low-income families of young children. With a cross-site sample of 450 Latino parents of children in preschool through first grade, construct validity of the FIQ-EC was examined using Rasch methods and expert panel review. Results from Rasch analyses provided further support for the reliability of the factors comprising the FIQ-EC, as well as provided nuanced information regarding item and person functioning for this Latino sample. These results, in combination with expert panel reviews, suggested avenues for further item development when using this scale with low-income, Latino families. The current study has implications for validating measurement tools for use with diverse populations and also provides some clues about the role low-income, Latino families play in their children's schooling for consideration in future research.

Salient early intervention approaches for children below the age of 3 years, such as home visiting, seek to strengthen the pivotal role that parents play in fostering their young children's early learning. Yet, measures that identify and monitor the ways in which low-income parents support toddlers' learning experiences are lacking. Without parent involvement measures for toddlers, evidence-based advancement of home visiting with regard to this key outcome is restricted. This study undertook a mixed-method approach to obtain perceptions of involvement behaviors from ethnic minority home visitors who were associated with a national home visiting program and to translate these perceptions into a meaningful, preliminary measure for children aged 2 and 3 years. Named the Parent Involvement in Early Learning scale, a statistical approach combining classical test and item response theories produced preliminary single dimensions of home-based involvement for the English and Spanish translations. This study is presented as a first step in raising awareness of parent involvement for this age group and directing future research.

Introduction: In response to the public health threats during the pandemic, many schools shifted to online instructional delivery, and many children experienced changes to their social and recreational activities. While an emerging body of literature is documenting these changes or how these experiences may be related to parents' and children's functioning, no known study has examined all of these constructs. We investigated the degree to which schooling, social, and recreational experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the stress levels of school-age children. Further, recognizing the interconnectedness of parents' and children's lives, we examined whether parental stress mediated the relations between children's experiences and child stress. Method: Parents of school-age children (N = 701) completed an online questionnaire with items focused on school modality (i.e., fully online or not), sufficiency of school resources, change in relationships, change in social/recreational activities, parental stress, and child stress. Results: The findings indicated that fully online school was not associated with child stress. Lower sufficiency of school resources, greater change in relationships, and greater change in social/recreational activities predicted higher child stress. Parental stress fully or partially mediated these relations. Discussion: Implications for educators are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of emergent literacy for young children who are ethnic-minority, low-income or non-English speaking is threatened by myriad social risks. Given the need for empirically-supported interventions for these groups, a comprehensive literature review was undertaken, involving both a descriptive review and a meta-analysis. The 31 selected published articles each satisfied criteria for being an intervention study involving caregivers in its delivery to children between the ages of two to six years. A meta-analysis was conducted using a subset of 14 studies that utilized an experimental or quasi-experimental design. This two-pronged review demonstrated significant limitations in the generalizability of this literature to these important groups of children. Future directions for advancing intervention development are presented. (Contains 6 tables.)

Extending the knowledge derived from investigations with teachers, this study explores of the interrelationship of school psychologists' professional efficacy and perceived school climate for promoting family collaboration and salient aspects of their training and practice. The Perceptions of Capacity for Family Collaboration (PCFC) rating scale was developed and completed by a national sample of 544 school psychologists. Psychometric evaluation of the PCFC indicated two reliable dimensions: Professional Efficacy and School Climate. Relationships between these two dimensions and aspects of school psychologists' graduate training, professional development, and current practices were examined. Results show important connections between school psychologists' perceptions of professional efficacy and school climate, as relevant for formulating family partnerships, are related to the extensiveness of their training and aspects of their employment for interfacing with families. Implications of this study for the training and practice of school psychologists are discussed. (Contains 4 tables.)

Joseph Zins was a forerunner in empirically demonstrating the interrelationship of SEL interventions and school success. This commentary highlights his perspectives on the accumulating body of evidence for the academic gains that have been associated with various SEL interventions and aims to show how new research methodologies can further extend the scientific support as well as enhance the cultural responsiveness of SEL interventions. A partnership approach to research is advocated for addressing three important research directions: defining and measuring social and emotional competencies, co-constructing intervention programs, and achieving system-level program integration.

Objective: The current study examines (a) whether ADHD among college students is associated with differences in perceptions of quality of life (QoL); (b) the moderating roles of comorbidity, drug use, psychopharmacological treatment, and psychosocial treatment; and (c) the total impact of these variables on QoL. Method: Participants were college students with and without ADHD (N = 372) in a longitudinal study. Results: College students with ADHD were more likely to assert negative global QoL evaluations relative to non-ADHD peers. The relationship between ADHD and QoL was not altered as a function of medication treatment, comorbid psychopathology, psychosocial treatment, or drug use. Conclusion: College students with ADHD behave similarly to other adults with ADHD in that they make lower subjective global evaluations of their QoL relative to their non-ADHD agemates. Other factors associated with ADHD and QoL do not appear to moderate this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]