Meeting a crucial need, this book provides clear recommendations for authentic developmental assessment of children from infancy to age 6, including those with developmental delays and disabilities. It describes principles and strategies for collecting information about children's everyday activities in the home, preschool, and community, which provides a valid basis for intervention planning and progress monitoring. Throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of enlisting parents as partners with practitioners and teachers in observation and team-based decision making. Special features of this well-organized, accessible volume include recommendations for developmentally appropriate assessment tools and "Best-Practice Guidepoints" in each chapter that distill key professional standards and practices.

Traditional assessment measures can miss critical temperament and self-regulation problems that may indicate a child's risk for atypical development. Now there's TABS -- a new, norm-referenced screening and assessment tool for infants and young children ages 11-17 months. TABS is specifically designed to identify temperament and self-regulation behavioral indicators as early as possible by surveying key behavioral areas, including temperament, attention and activity, attachment and social behavior, neurobehavioral state, sleeping, play, vocal and oral behavior, senses and movement, and self-stimulatory behavior.

TABS has been normed on nearly 1,000 young children from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds developing typically and atypically. TABS normative research provides clinical validity for the regulatory disorder axis of the Diagnostic Classification System: 0-3, published by Zero to three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. With TABS, professionals will be able to determine eligibility for early intervention and mental health behavioral support services because TABS scores coincide with state eligibility criteria for early intervention services and with mental health criteria for DSM-IV diagnoses. Use TABS today for Child Find, screening, determining eligibility for special services, planning education and intervention (e.g., IEPs, IFSPs, and wraparound mental health behavioral support plans), monitoring child progress and program effectiveness, and conducting applied research.

The manual provides all of the necessary information for the administration and scoring of TABS, plus relevant reliability and validity data, including normative means, standarddeviations, and cut-off scores for both typical and atypical samples. A handy intervention guide offers item-by-item strategies for minimizing problematic, atypical behavior.