Welcome to the Early Achievements website. The Early Achievements intervention is designed to help young children learn more effectively, and to help teachers design and deliver more effective instruction.
Early Achievements is based on solid scientific principles; it is a state-of-the-science approach to instruction. The child learning goals targeted by Early Achievements are essential for children's educational success. These learning goals focus on language, social, and cognitive developmental domains. The instructional activities within Early Achievements are designed to be fun for children, motivating them to participate and to interact more effectively.
With funding from the federal Office of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, we are now partnering with public school districts in four states to test the effectiveness of the Early Achievements intervention for preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders and social communication delays.
The Early Achievements intervention has been adapted for use in community settings. The intervention is anchored in the developmental, cognitive, behavioral, and neurosciences. In the translation of scientific findings into an intervention that could be feasibly implemented in community settings, four main principles have been defined:
As you will see in each of the remaining three principles, Early Achievements incorporates teacher-implemented strategies and instructional content designed to maximize children’s attention engagement.
In the Early Achievements intervention model, children’s active participation is a priority. Many hands-on learning opportunities are presented by teachers, aimed at fostering children’s initiation and reciprocal participation in interactions with instructional materials and people.
Instructional content and experiences in the Early Achievements intervention are tailored to children’s perspectives, interests, life experiences, and developmental levels. This means that the learning experiences children are having in the classroom are relevant to their lives. Teachers learn to transform instruction into relevant and developmentally appropriate experiences for children. As a result, teachers become more intentional in their instruction and better able to deliver differentiated instruction.
Children’s success in life and in school is partly dependent on their ability to create meaning from their own experiences and from the stories they hear at home and at school. Early Achievements helps children to make sense of the world around them by strategically shaping their experiences and making stories come alive. Through the Early Achievements intervention, children develop skills that are essential for literacy development.
Dr. Landa’s research has a lifespan focus. Her research has addressed biological and experience-related influences on child development. Currently, her primary research emphasis is on
One of those interventions is Early Achievements. As part of her research, Dr. Landa has developed a number of innovative assessment tools, ranging from infant assessments, to a new video-guided social communication screener, to a measure of pragmatic (social) language functioning in children and adults. Her research also employs state-of-the-science methods to study learning process and intervention effects in infants and children.
Early Achievements CARD from Kennedy Krieger on Vimeo.
Rebecca Landa, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is the developer of the Early Achievements intervention model. She is the Founder and Director of Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Landa obtained her Masters of Science degree from the Pennsylvania State University, and her Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Sciences. She served as a speech-language pathologist in an urban public school system before taking a faculty position at the Washington State University. She later completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychiatric Genetics and Developmental Neuropsychology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Landa's passion is to create innovative ways for children to become all they can be. She is dedicated to finding new ways to help children overcome barriers to success, learn more effectively, and live more fulfilled lives. As her research identifies effective interventions, she is expanding her work to develop and evaluate professional development programs that help teachers and early child care educators use these interventions in their classrooms.
CARD is one of 23 sites across the country recruiting for SPARK (Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge), an online study seeking to advance our understanding of autism. Individuals with autism living in the United States and their parents are invited to join.
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More CARD researchers publish new findings on pragmatic communication in siblings of children with ASD.
