Abstract:

The Division for Early Childhood (DEC) Recommended Practices (RPs) are developed to bridge the gap between research and practice and offer guidance to parents and practitioners who work with young children (birth through five years of age) who have or are at risk for developmental delays or disabilities. The main goal is to highlight practices that have been shown to result in better outcomes for young children with disabilities, their families, and the professionals who serve them (DEC, 2014). The Recommended Practices were first developed by DEC in 1991 to provide guidance to the relatively new field of Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education (EI/ECSE) and the practices had their first revision in the late 1990s. Another set of revisions were conducted by DEC in 2013 and the process resulted in an updated and new set of DEC RPs (DEC, 2014). The purpose is to help bridge the gap between research and practice by highlighting those practices that have been shown to result in better outcomes for young children with disabilities, their families, and the personnel who serve them.

The DEC RPs are intended to be used by professionals who work across a variety of early childhood settings and provide services to young children who have or at-risk for developmental delays or disabilities and their families. The updated version of the Recommended Practices consists of eight domains: Leadership, Assessment, Environment, Family, Instruction, Interaction, Teaming and Collaboration, and Transition.

The purpose of this study, as the first cross-cultural validation of the DEC RPs, was to investigate opinions of key stakeholders in Turkey about the new Recommended Practices. Two main research questions were addressed in the present study:
(a) To what extent do key stakeholders in Turkey agree that practices identified through the best-available empirical evidence as well as the wisdom and experience of the field should be recommended practices for the field?
(b) To what extent do key stakeholders report that practices identified through the best-available empirical evidence as well as the wisdom and experience of the field are used in programs with which they are familiar?

Survey sample included four groups of stakeholders: teachers and parents, school administrators, and higher education personal. Recruitment of participants was accomplished by distributing 1000 surveys to 500 teachers and 250 parents, and 250 administrators and higher education personal across seven cities in Turkey. A total of 301 individuals returned the survey package back to the researchers (return rate = %30). Seven of the 301 surveys were incomplete or returned unanswered, yielding an adjusted sample size of 294. Findings showed that all 65 practices met the validation criterion (i.e., more than 50% of participants selecting agree or strongly agree option for a practice), meaning that all DEC RPs were perceived as important by stakeholders in Turkey. In contrast to these promising findings, results with respect to reported use the DEC RPs in early childhood settings showed that DEC RPs were rarely or never used by early childhood practitioners.

Keywords:

Early intervention, early childhood special education, recommended practices, perspectives, stakeholder.