The individual family service plan: Unresolved problems

The federal requirement to develop an Individual Family Service Plan (IFSP) for all infants and toddlers with special needs has a major conceptual difficulty that has, to date, been inadequately addressed in the literature. That problem stems from the linkage of family service to family assessment. Many authorities, attracted to parental “empowerment” theory, advocate that parents should be the authors rather than (or as well as) the objects of assessment, and that professionals and parents should be partners in assessing needs and planning services. When there is disagreement, professionals should defer to parents, who are in the best position to assess their own needs. We question the wisdom of conducting assessments with, or on, families of targeted children. But, if there are to be assessments, we argue that families are better served, and mutual respect better preserved, by a traditional complementary relationship: The professional controls the evaluation process, determines the problems (with the input of the family), and makes recommendations, which parents are then free to reject.     

Validity of the parenting inventory: Young children

The Parenting Inventory: Young Children (PI) is a rating scale that measures the developmental expectations and behaviors of parents of children who are between the ages of 1 and 4 years, 11 months. Using a representative urban sample of 1,056 mothers, the PI was found to discriminate successfully between parents with children of different ages and to have substantial item-construct correlations (content validity). The PI was not strongly related to the Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory, a measure of parenting attitudes (discriminant validity). Reasons for this latter finding are discussed. Potential uses of the PI for practitioners working with parents in the schools are described.     

Curriculum bias and reading achievement test performance

The overlap of words specifically taught in reading textbooks with the contents of standardized reading achievement tests may be a source of bias that is frequently overlooked in psychoeducational assessments. This study compares the standardized achievement test performance of 62 second graders receiving instruction in two different reading curricula (Open Court and Houghton-Mifflin) to determine whether either curriculum generates different quantitative estimates of reading achievement. Reading subtest scores derived from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Brief Form (K-TEA), the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised (WRAT-R), and the Reading Recognition and Reading Comprehension subtests from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) were examined. Grade level equivalents and scaled scores from the California Achievement Test (CAT) were also examined. Three Curriculum × Test repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted using grade level scores (2×7), standard scores (2×4), and CAT scaled scores (2 × 5) as dependent measures. A significant Curriculum × Test interaction was identified, suggesting differences among tests in estimates of reading ability as a function of the reading program.     

Crisis intervention teams in the schools

When a crisis occurs in the school setting, school officials must be prepared to handle the situation effectively and efficiently. One of the ways school officials can handle a crisis situation is through the use of crisis intervention teams. The steps in establishing a crisis intervention team in a school setting include: determining goals, performing a needs assessment, finding model programs, developing a membership pool, developing a training program, preparing and maintaining a list of resources and plans for support services, establishing a communication network, designating a base of operations, planning team meetings, keeping records, and implementing the phases of debriefing. A crisis management scenario is presented and discussed in terms of the steps.     

Robotic automation of droplet microfluidics

Droplet microfluidics enables powerful analytic capabilities but often requires workflows involving macro- and microfluidic processing steps that are cumbersome to perform manually. Here, we demonstrate the automation of droplet microfluidics with commercial fluid-handling robotics. The workflows incorporate common microfluidic devices including droplet generators, mergers, and sorters and utilize the robot''s native capabilities for thermal control, incubation, and plate scanning. The ability to automate microfluidic devices using commercial fluid handling will speed up the integration of these methods into biological workflows.