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1. Foundations for the Need for Evidence-Informed

Early Childhood Intervention Performance

Checklists and Practice Guides

Abstract

xponential growth in knowledge about early intervention and early childhood intervention theo-
E ry, research, and practice now requires explicit attention to knowledge harvesting, management,
and sharing if the full spectrum of knowledge is going to be used to inform improvements in the
lives of young children and their families. This has been accomplished using different approaches
to knowledge sharing, including the development of performance checklists informed by research
evidence, where a checklist includes the minimum number of steps needed to complete a practice in
a competent manner. This chapter includes a description of the process for using the 2014 Division
for Early Childhood Recommended Practices to develop performance checklists, and why many of
those practices proved problematic in terms of informing the selection or development of perfor-
mance checklist indicators (active ingredients, key characteristics, core components). The ways in
which the limitations were overcome as part of developing evidence-informed performance check-
lists and practice guides are described.

Keywords: Early childhood intervention, knowledge growth, knowledge management, knowledge
sharing, performance checklists, practice guides

1. Introduction 1960 and 1970. Many people are surprised to learn that
the rationale and foundations for early childhood inter-
uckminister Fuller, in his book Critical Path, noted vention in the late 1960s and early 1970s included in-
Bthat up until 1900 human knowledge was doubling tervention studies of young children in institutions (e.g.,
every 100 years, whereas by the end of World War II, Flint, 1966; Skeels, Updegraff, Wellman, & Williams,
knowledge was doubling every 25 years (Fuller, 1981). 1938) and studies of supplemental experiences provided
Derek Prince, in Little Science, Big Science, noted that to different kinds of animals (e.g., Beach & Jaynes, 1954;
by 1960 human knowledge was doubling every 10 years Denenberg, 1964). Fast forwarding to the 21st Century,
(Prince, 1963). As a result of high speed computers, en- Google Scholar searches of early intervention and early
hanced chip performance, the World Wide Web, and the childhood intervention yielded more than 50,000 cita-
Internet, knowledge has been growing in an exponential tions for the 10 year period ending in 2017.
manner where it is now estimated that knowledge is dou- Figure 1-1 shows the knowledge growth curve from
bling every 12 to 18 months (e.g., Jensen, McElreath, & Google Scholar searches for early intervention and early
Graves, 2018). According to IBM, the continued expan- childhood intervention for every five year period of time
sion of the “internet of things” will result in knowledge between 1960 and 2014. Searches for “early interven-
doubling every 12 hours (IBM Global Technology Ser- tion” OR “early childhood intervention” were combined
vices, 2006). with the terms infants OR toddlers OR preschoolers to
Something akin to this type of knowledge growth return only results of relevant citations. (The term infant
has occurred in early childhood intervention. In the late stimulation, used early in the history of early childhood
1960s and early 1970s, knowledge about early interven- intervention, was not included in the searches since the
tion and early childhood intervention was quite limited term has fallen into disfavor, as evidenced by a decrease
(see Caldwell, 1970, 1971). A Google Scholar search of in the number of search results beginning in the late
these types of interventions with infants, toddlers, and 1980s.) The exponential shape of the curve is almost
preschoolers finds fewer than 200 citations between identical to that of knowledge growth in general (e.g.,
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This chapter was prepared expressly for this monograph as an open-access article pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Creative
Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The opinions expressed are solely those of the author
in his private capacity and no affiliation with or endorsement by any Institute, University, Center, program, organization, funder, or
any other entity should be implied or inferred.

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