Engagement behaviors of young children with disabilities: Relationships with preschool teachers' implementation of embedded instruction.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Engagement is hypothesized to be an important mediating factor in young children's development and learning. A major purpose of early intervention for young children with disabilities is to promote child engagement. While child engagement and related factors have been descriptively investigated since the 1970s, few studies have systematically examined relationships between practitioners' implementation of instructional approaches and the engagement behaviors of young children with disabilities. One promising instructional approach designed to alter the engagement behaviors of young children with disabilities during preschool classroom activities is embedded instruction.
The purpose of the present study was to investigate corollary relationships between the engagement behaviors of four young children with disabilities during two types of child-initiated activities and their teachers' implementation of embedded instruction learning trials (EILTs). EILTs data were obtained from a previously conducted single-subject experimental study involving four teachers. The single-subject experimental study was designed to evaluate functional relationships between teachers' exposure to three components of an embedded instruction professional development intervention and their implementation of EILTs. The present study explored changes in children's engagement behaviors across single-subject experimental study phases and examined corollary relationships between teachers' implementation of EILTs and child engagement behaviors.
The Engagement Behavior Observation System: Research Version II (EBOSRVII) was used in the present study to quantify child engagement behaviors. Data sources were 269 videotapes collected for the four participating children across the experimental phases of the single-subject study. The child-initiated activities captured on these videotapes were classified as either social-oriented or materials-oriented and the EBOS-RVII coding system was applied to children's behavior within each type of activity.
Child engagement behaviors and teachers' implementation of EILTs across each experimental phase were examined separately relative to baseline. Results showed children generally exhibited higher-level engagement behaviors and teachers generally increased their implementation of EILTs across phases and activity types. Corollary relationships between child engagement behaviors and teachers' implementation of EILTs were explored for each teacher-child dyad, using visual inspection and rank-order correlation analyses. Corollary relationships were found between select child engagement behaviors and teachers' implementation of EILTs. Recommendations for future research and practice are provided based on study findings.