Search

Introduction: There is a significant shortage of behavioral health providers trained in caring for patients with problematic substance use, particularly within integrated care settings. Method: An innovative addictions nursing subspecialty curriculum was designed by interdisciplinary faculty from psychiatric nursing, family nursing, counseling, and social work and informed by integrated care, addictions, and telehealth competencies. The subspecialty included prevention, treatment, and recovery approaches to care and encouraged enrollment of students from various health-related disciplines to enhance the students' experiences of integrated care for substance use treatment prior to completion of the program. Results: Subspecialty courses increased the number of advanced practice nurses in the behavioral health care workforce with enhanced knowledge of integrated telehealth substance use treatment. Discussion: Implementation of similar innovative curricula across health disciplines may significantly improve the care delivered to patients with problematic substance use in traditional medical settings. Keywords: addictions, substance use, advance practice nursing, integrated care, telehealth, Nationally, opioid use disorder (OUD) and other substance use disorders (SUDs) represent a widespread problem for children, adolescents, and transitional-age youths, as well as adults. Approximately 19.7 million people aged [...]

In order to produce coherent text, natural language generation systems must have the ability to generate pronouns in the appropriate places. In the past, pronoun usage was primarily investigated with respect to the accessibility of referents. That is, it was assumed that a pronoun should be generated whenever the referent was sufficiently accessible so as to make its resolution easy. W e found that such an explanation does not seem to account well for the patterns of pronoun usage found in naturally occurring texts. We present an algorithm for generating appropriate anaphoric expressions which takes into account the temporal structure of texts (as a discourse structuring device) and knowledge about ambiguous contexts. Other important factors in our algorithm are sentence boundaries and the distance from the last mention of the anaphor. We back up our hypotheses with some empirical results indicating that our algorithm chooses the right referring expression in 85% of the cases.

The Incredible Years® (IY) program series is a set of interlocking and comprehensive training programs for parents, teachers, and children. This article briefly reviews the theoretical foundations, goals, and research underlying these programs. The main purpose of the paper is to describe how the IY programs have been scaled up slowly and carefully with fidelity by engaging in a collaborative building project with strong links between the developer, agency or school administrator, mentors, coaches, clinicians, and families using eight foundational building blocks or fidelity tools.

The purpose of this special issue is to provide readers with a greater awareness of the processes involved in dissemination, as well as existing supports that help disseminate and sustain evidence-based interventions. Although dissemination research is limited in most disciplines, it is particularly lacking in the social science field. Many interventions aimed to help children and adolescents are found to be efficacious every year, but program developers are often not equipped to understand how to scale up a program or sustain it after the initial funding. Consumers (e.g., service providers, who are consumers of interventions), on the other hand, often do not understand all that goes into implementing and scaling up an intervention. This special issue will: (a) introduce readers to the problem; (b) discuss some of the challenges with disseminating programs; and (c) present various existing supports that can help scale up and sustain interventions.

Academic transitions are a necessary and important part of an ASD student's life. Parental involvement and perspective is a vital part of each transition planning process. The primary goal of this research was to identify trends in parent perspectives regarding ASD academic transitions through meta-synthesis of current research. The research also seeks to identify shifts in parent perceptions of the importance of specific transitional program elements during different academic transitional periods. Results indicated a clear trend within each academic transition category as well as trends throughout the transition periods. The main trend in parental perspective throughout the transitions is the de-structuration of the transition planning process and increased personalization with the advancement of each academic transition. Possible uses of research results to ease the transition planning process for parents are summarized and discussed.

In the People's Republic of China, many children with autism are excluded from government supported schools and parents are expected to deliver educational services. Parent training centers offer short term solutions by providing information regarding autism and instructional methods to parents of children with autism. In order to further refine teaching services, one training center encouraged parents to indicate which topics in a curriculum were important to them. Participants were 55 parents of children with autism ages 3-8, who completed a questionnaire in which they identified referral services received, needs and concerns for further training, and attitudes towards collaboration. Results indicated that parents' most important needs were centered on developing their children's communication skills and a desire to collaborate with teachers, and that they received very few initial referral services. Findings are discussed in the context of human and social capital for parents of children with autism in the People's Republic of China.

This study compared a stimulus fading (SF) procedure with a constant time delay (CTD) procedure for identification of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense words for a participant with autism. An alternating treatments design was utilized through a computer-based format. Receptive identification of target words was evaluated using a computer format and the researcher conducted a generalization probe for expressive identification evaluation. Neither treatment condition resulted in consistent gains on the receptive identification measure. Both treatment conditions resulted in gains on the expressive identification assessment. The SF treatment condition was more efficient due to 1) accuracy in identifying all of the SF target words in fewer sessions than the CTD target words and 2) incidental learning that occurred as a result of exposure to additional SF words as distracter choices and in receptive identification assessments. Implications are discussed.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a self-monitoring strategy on independent work behavior. The three subjects were in first grade, seven years old, identified with mild intellectual disability (MID), and had an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) with targeted functional academic and behavior goals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a self-monitoring strategy on on-task independent work behavior and task completion. A multiple baseline across subjects design was used. Data were collected using a frequency count of off-task behavior. The self-monitoring strategy was found to be successful with all subjects in the study. Overall, the subjects demonstrated a decrease in off-task behavior during independent work time after the intervention was introduced. Implications are discussed. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Advancing the long-term prospective study of explanations for the effects of marital conflict on children's functioning, relations were examined between interparental conflict in kindergarten, children's emotional insecurity in the early school years, and subsequent adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems. Based on a community sample of 235 mothers, fathers, and children (Ms = 6.00, 8.02, 12.62 years), and multimethod and multireporter assessments, structural equation model tests provided support for emotional insecurity in early childhood as an intervening process related to adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems, even with stringent autoregressive controls over prior levels of functioning for both mediating and outcome variables. Discussion considers implications for understanding pathways between interparental conflict, emotional insecurity, and adjustment in childhood and adolescence. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Research strongly suggests that visual supports, such as pictures, prompts, cue cards, story boards, graphic schedules, and diagrams, have been effective for providing instructional structure for a wide variety of children and for multiple activities. Making successful transitions from one activity to another is difficult for many children, especially those with cognitive, language, or behavioral disabilities. The length of time to transition between content areas, for example, math to reading or from one classroom to another, is directly relevant to the amount of time available for student engagement in an expected task. In this study, a classroom teacher designed a transition intervention to facilitate the expected behaviors for entering the classroom and engaging in seatwork. She measured the effect of the combination of video modeling (VM) and cue card on the behavior of six 4th graders identified as needing assistance related to on-task behaviors. VM provided the students with a demonstration of the entire transition sequence beginning with entry into the classroom and ending with the expected seatwork. The cue card provided directions for expected time needed to predict effectiveness of the intervention, and what if any fading schedule with the video model or cue card should be implemented. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

Background: This study addresses the gaps in understanding the relationship between constructive and destructive marital conflict and children's prosocial behavior from a process-oriented perspective. Method: Data were drawn from a three-wave study of 235 families with children ages 5-7 at wave 1. Relations between constructive and destructive marital conflict, children's emotional security, warm parenting and children's prosocial behavior were examined through the use of structural equation modeling. Results: Even after controlling for prior levels of children's prosocial behavior at wave 1, children's emotional security acted as an intervening variable between both constructive and destructive marital conflict and children's prosocial behavior over time. Conclusions: These findings advance the relationship between marital conflict and children's adjustment by focusing on children's prosocial behavior and highlight the need to further investigate the impact of positive dimensions of marital conflict on dimensions of children's positive social functioning.

Despite the national, state, and local emphasis on academic progress and standards, the curricular needs of the 3 million highly talented and gifted youth in the U.S. generally have not been embraced as a priority. In many high schools, academically precocious students are expected to progress on their own. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Carl Perkins Act require schools to educate students with mild disabilities in general education classrooms to the greatest extent possible; this legislation has provided federal funding for services to these students. On the "other side of the coin," educational services for gifted and talented students do not yet have similar mandates or funding as those for individuals with disabilities. Educational services for gifted and talented students in the U.S. vary dramatically from state to state, ranging from none to special self-contained classes. In this article, the authors discuss the characteristics of gifted and talented students, present two models for addressing their needs, and suggest a variety of strategies for adapting instruction for gifted students in business classes. (Contains 6 resources.)

The need to support and retain beginning teachers has become critical given: (1) the shortage of teachers in certain disciplines, and (2) the current emphasis on teacher qualifications and student achievement. In this study, five first year special education teachers in the southwestern section of the United States provided information on the persons and activities that supplied them with much needed and valued support. The results indicate that having a strong network of support and a variety of resources positively influenced these teachers' ability to focus on student learning and on their intent to remain in their positions.

Students with special learning problems, like all children, need to learn social studies. The challenge, however, is how to provide access to social studies content in a general education setting to children with mild disabilities. For at least 20 years the traditional textbook-based instructional approach has been found to be ineffective. The traditional method of lecture-read-group discussion is likely to miss the needs of many students with learning problems, especially those at the middle and secondary levels, where textbooks are heavily used. Overwhelming numbers of students with learning problems are reading two or more years below grade level--never mind that they lack strategies for comprehension skills such as drawing inferences or locating main ideas to apply to real-world situations. This article discusses effective instructional strategies for teaching social studies to children with mild learning problems, including models of social studies instruction, instructional formats, and implementation of such strategies.

This study, with 96 sales clerks, examined conversational trade-offs with customers using augmentative or alternative communication (AAC) in scripted videotaped conversational conditions. The clerks rated the conditions involving slowly delivered relevant messages higher than quickly delivered partly relevant messages. Also, messages preceded by a conversational floorholder were rated higher than those without. (Contains references.) (DB)