ABSTRACT
In just 30 years, the state of early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) has gone from providing isolated pockets of services offered to families at their own expense, to mandated services for preschoolers with disabilities in all 50 states and the availability of services to infants with disabilities in most states. In this 30-year period, the profession of ECSE has emerged as one of the strongest areas within special education, boasting one of the largest and most active professional organizations, as well as the development of teacher credentialing in most states, the availability of specialized training programs at severed institutions of higher education, and an expanding professional literature. These advances have occurred in spite of the fact that prior to 1966, the field had virtually no knowledge on which to base decisions about what to teach infants and young children with disabilities or risks, how to teach them, who should teach these children and what competencies they would need, and where educational services should be delivered to these children and their families. Although researchers in ECSE and in related fields of developmental psychology and early childhood education have provided answers to some of these questions, what still awaits is the identification of effective educational practices. The larger fields of general and special education have important empirically based knowledge bases identifying effective teaching practices and guiding practice (see Algozzine & Maheady, 1986; Brophy, 1979); however, no similar bodies of information have been generated and diffused to practitioners in EI/ECSE. This is true in spite of a plethora of empirical studies documenting the effectiveness of individual intervention practices (see Guralnick & Bennett, 1987).
