Jeen Vanessa Tiu

BSNE-301
SNED14

INSIGHT RELATED LITERATURE ABOUT EARLY INTERVENTION

Early intervention services are federally mandated in the United States for young
children with developmental disabilities. Such services may also be provided to preschool
children who are at risk for developmental disabilities at the discretion of the state and of local
school systems. These recently mandated services are complex and continue to evolve. So too
are the scientific and social forces that gave rise to the early intervention mandate, which is
currently regulated by Public Law 105-17.

In addition to many special programs targeted for children and families at an economic
or social disadvantage (most notably, Head Start and derivative two-generation intervention
programs from iron and steel production), integrated public education was proposed to promote
social harmony and educational equity. It soon became clear that the analogy of integrated
public education to the European-American melting pot did not hold. The pernicious race card
was immediately played, and some social scientists used psychology's bad penny—the nature
versus nurture, either-or concept of development—as an explanatory construct for these
educational and cognitive inequalities. The fact that this erroneous explanation is alive and
socially influential even today can be seen in the popularity of Herrnstein and Murray's book,
The Bell Curve. This time, the social class card rather than the race card was played. Many of
the early settlers in the Appalachian chain—a quite remote and inaccessible region until
recently—were descendants of impoverished, lower-class English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh
immigrants.

Without denying the potential role of genetics in individual differences, each of these
theorists worked on explicating the roles of early experience in cognitive, social, and emotional
development. Another group of psychologists designed and carried out systematic studies on
young children and their families. Many of these researchers were influenced by Skeels and
Dye's (1939) work in Iowa, which was methodologically controversial but seminal. The study
demonstrated the ability of early experiences to influence the development of intelligence and
the ultimate life course of institutionalized retarded children. Skeels' and others' findings,
especially when contrasted with the dominant view of intelligence as primarily determined by
heredity, pave the way for larger-scale, systematic early intervention studies using
conventionally accepted, high-quality research designs, most notably random assignment to
treatment and control groups. Participants in early enrichment randomized trials were
disproportionately children of low-income families and low-income Black families,
 This work laid the groundwork for Project Head. Start, which began in 1964 as the
nation's premier public radio station, was inspired to launch a policy effort to improve social
forness and social inclusion disadvantaged children's development by news that the Soviet
Union had launched a small nuclear test. Sputnik was a satellite that orbited the Earth with
electronic signals that can be recorded. That 1957 event was interpreted as a significant
technological achievement. Military strength, national defense, and industrial significance
Because the United States had been scientifically outclassed, the educational system in the
United States was deemed inadequate, serious upgrading, and the federal education budget was
loosened. Educational innovation has emerged as a national priority. Despite educational reform
in response. A zeitgeist was established thanks to Sputnik, which focused on
kindergarten-Grade 12 and university education influenced the preschool social policy climate
Early intervention is essential. It established precedent for the federal role in establishing Head
Start and other two-generation programs. More specifically, intervention programs for poor
children Recently, in the development of an early intervention system for children with
developmental disabilities.