SUMMARY AND NEXT STEPS

Attendees included researchers from across the country and employees from various Federal agencies that support research about young children and families. Meeting goals included identifying critical research gaps that need to be addressed to (1) foster novel program development or improvement of early childhood interventions and (2) increase the uptake and implementation of effective preventive interventions for young children and their families within child service settings.

Below are some examples of future research directions:

• Encourage the establishment or use of existing appropriate large-scale representative populations of children aged 0-5 and their families, and make those data available for analysis across disciplines;
• Continue to design small efficacy and effectiveness trials to provide understanding of varied intervention designs, mechanisms of change, the core elements of an intervention, and efficient training before taking an intervention to scale;
• Expand prevention intervention research to identify core components to ensure fidelity to critical processes that affect outcomes;
• Encourage collaborative partnerships between researchers and community practitioners to design effective research paradigms that can later be transferred to child service settings;
• Encourage research that embeds interventions within service systems, incorporates economic analyses, and examines organizational and management factors that may influence implementation, fidelity, and outcomes of early intervention;
• Improve research design and methodologies to increase power and discern benefits of interventions;
• Improve biological and cognitive measurement to expand research on understanding the neurobiological developmental processes and implications for preventive interventions in early childhood;
• Encourage the translation of basic research to design novel prevention programs within the context of child service settings; and
• Encourage research on mapping the social and developmental environments of children to understand how early intervention affects the child's developmental trajectory.