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Professionals' Judgments of Peer Interaction Interventions: A Survey of Members of the Division for Early Childhood

Columbia College

William H. Brown

University of South Carolina at Columbia, bbrown{at}gwm.sc.edu

John M. Grego

University of South Carolina at Columbia

Robert Johnson

University of South Carolina at Columbia

We surveyed a sample of the membership of the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) with the Social Interaction Program Features Questionnaire-Revised (SIPFQ-R) to determine their judgments of the acceptability, feasibility, and current use of contemporary peer interaction intervention tactics and strategies. We analyzed resultant information descriptively and with MANOVA procedures. In addition, we collected respondents' perspectives about barriers to the implementation of social interaction interventions and the proportion of preschool children they believed could benefit from peer interaction interventions. Results indicated that DEC members judged a majority of social interaction intervention tactics and strategies as acceptable but members rated many of those interventions as less feasible and reported them to have relatively lower rates of use. We believe the findings indicate that a continuing research to practice gap exists for peer interaction interventions in early childhood special education (cf. Brown & Conroy, 2001). Given that gap, we call for targeted professional development activities focused on a range of social interaction intervention tactics and strategies and renewed research efforts to refine and develop teacher friendly intervention strategies for practitioners who work in community-based preschools.

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Journal of Early Intervention, Vol. 30, No. 1, 36-54 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/105381510703000104


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