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Biomedical subjects

C T Ramey

Publications and source records attributed to C T Ramey.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Infant Health and Development Program for low birth weight, premature infants: program elements, family participation, and child intelligence.

The Infant Health and Development Program was an eight-site randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy of early intervention to enhance the cognitive, behavioral, and health status of low birth weight, premature infants. The 377 intervention families received for the first 3 years of life: (1) pediatric follow-up, (2) home visits, (3) parent support groups, and (4) a systematic educational program provided in specialized child development centers. The control group (n = 608) received the same pediatric follow-up and referral services only. This paper describes the delivery of the intervention and its outcomes. A Family Participation Index that was the sum of participation frequencies in each of the program modalities unique to the intervention revealed that program implementation was not different across the eight sites. Index scores did not vary systematically with mother's ethnicity, age, or education or with child's birth weight, gender, or neonatal health status; but they were positively related to children's IQ scores at age 3. Only 1.9% of children of families in the highest tercile of participation scored in the mentally retarded range (IQ less than or equal to 70), whereas 3.5% and 13% of children in the middle and lowest participation terciles, respectively, scored in the retarded range. Similar findings were obtained for borderline intellectual functioning. These findings are consistent with previous research linking intensity of intervention services with degree of positive cognitive outcomes for high-risk infants. The determinants of variations in individual family participation remain unknown.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1992

Effective early intervention.

Recent positive findings from three early educational intervention programs designed to prevent mental retardation as well as to improve school readiness and educational progress were summarized. Evidence was presented to show that without early intervention, children of low-IQ mothers are particularly at-risk for poor intellectual outcomes and that such children respond very favorably to intensive, systematic early intervention. In addition, new findings indicate a strong relation between the intensity of the early educational intervention and the amount of benefits realized by individual children. Further, there is new evidence that the benefits of continuous educational intervention over the first 5 years of life last at least until early adolescence. We identified six essential types of experiences that we think account for the positive outcomes and that need to be systematically included to the maximum feasible level in future early intervention programs.

Child↗
PubMed1991

Family support in the home. Programs, policy, and social change.

The need for a coordinated national policy on family support in the home is discussed. First, the history of home visiting programs is reviewed. Then, recommendations for practice, training, and research in family support programs are presented. A discussion of the impact of new federal initiatives on family support programs and research demonstration efforts follows.

Child↗
PubMed1990

The prevention of intellectual impairment in children of impoverished families: findings of a randomized trial of educational day care.

We estimated the effects of an experimental educational day care program on the intellectual development of preschoolers from 86 high-risk families in a randomly allocated longitudinal study. At six through 54 months of age, the IQs of experimental program children ranged from 7.9 to 20.1 points higher than those of control children when maternal mental retardation and home environment effects were controlled; at every age, a greater proportion of the experimental program children had normal range IQs (greater than 84). In 13 children with retarded mothers, none of six experimental program children, but six of seven control children, had IQ scores below normal.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

A longitudinal study of two early intervention strategies: Project CARE.

65 families with children at risk for cognitive difficulties were randomly assigned at the time of the child's birth to 1 of 3 groups, 2 intervention and 1 control. For the most intensive intervention group, family education was combined with a center-based educational day-care program; the less intensive intervention group received the home-based family education program only. To assess the cognitive performance of children, The Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered at 6, 12, and 18 months; the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test at 24, 36, and 48 months; and the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities at 30, 42, and 54 months. On each test after the 6-month assessment, scores of children in the educational day-care plus family support group were greater than those in the other 2 groups. No cognitive intervention effects were obtained for the family education group. Group effects were not obtained for measures of either the quality of the home environment or parent attention.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1990

Early intervention: why, for whom, how, and at what cost?

When the concept of intervention is applied to human development, the goal is usually to enhance functioning or to prevent some unwanted condition. During the past 20 years, the United States has committed itself to an early intervention position for young children who are socio-economically, educationally, or physically disadvantaged. This article summarizes the knowledge base concerning early educational interventions and to recommend actions concerning public policy and associated research.

Child Development↗
PubMed1989

Language skills of children with different preschool experiences.

This study examined the language at age 5 of socioeconomically disadvantaged children who had been randomly assigned at birth to a language-enriched day care program with a parent education component, a parent education program without a language-enriched day care, or no treatment. The interventions were administered between the ages of 3 months to 5 years. Language measures, reflecting children's ability to manipulate topics, as well as their structural complexity, semantic diversity, and general talkativeness were examined. The results showed that the disadvantaged children who attended the language-enriched day care program with the parent education component used a significantly greater proportion of high quality topic manipulation skills and less low quality topic manipulation skills during conversation than did children in the other two groups. The day care effect on high quality topic manipulation was present even after adjusting for children's intelligence and for the amount of community day care experience of the children in the parent education alone and control groups. No significant treatment differences were found for structural, semantic, and talkativeness measures. Implications of the result for early language intervention are discussed.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1979

Early childhood education for psychosocially disadvantaged children: effects on psychological processes.

The effects of early educational treatment upon the components of psychological development of children at high risk for sociocultural retardation were examined in 50 children. Twenty-six children attended, from infancy, a day-care center where educational treatment in the form of systematic curriculum was provided; 24 control children were educationally untreated. The McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities were administered to both groups at 42 months of age. The educationally treated group's scores were superior to the educationally untreated group on the Verbal, Perceptual-Performance, Quantitative, and Memory Scales but not on the Motor scale. Early education appeared to improve the children's ability to attend to, comprehend, and carry out abstract and complex tasks.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1979

Predicting IQ from mother-infant interactions.

Longitudinal observations of maternal and infant characteristics were used to investigate the consequences of early day-care intervention for infants at high risk for intellectual retardation due to sociocultural factors. High-risk infants and their mothers were compared on social and intellectual characteristics with a control group not enrolled in an intervention program and with a random sample of mother-child dyads from the general population. Results from group comparisons indicated that mothers of high-risk infants in a day-care intervention group interacted with their infants in ways quite similar to mother of high-risk infants who were not enrolled in the intervention program. Both high-risk groups differed from the general population of mothers on interaction and attitudinal measures. Changes across time on the measures taken were roughly parallel from all three groups. Multiple regression analyses using maternal variables and mother-infant interactional variables to predict 36-month Stanford-Binet scores for the high-risk samples indicated that children's intelligence was predictable from previous maternal behaviors and attitudes, particularly for the control group, and that early day-care intervention apparently had altered the predictiveness of some maternal factors.

Attitude↗
PubMed1978

Predicting school failure from information available at birth.

Information available from birth certificates was used to predict the psychological and educational status of approximately 1,000 randomly sampled first-grade children. The purpose of the research was to explore the feasibility of using birth certificate information as a cost-effective mechanism to identify children who were likely to need special educational services at public school entry. Multiple-regression and discriminant-function analyses revealed the following factors to be important in predicting psychoeducational status: birth order, race, educational status of the mother, month prenatal care began, survivorship of older siblings, and the child's legitimacy.

Achievement↗
PubMed1978

Effects of repeated assessment on standardized test performance by infants.

Infant-intervention programs that evaluate their effectiveness by repeatedly testing infants with standardized tests may confound intervention effects with repeated-testing effects. Further, maternal participation in testing may increase infants' test scores, either directly by giving infants practice with test-like items at home between test administrations or indirectly by helping infants adapt to the test setting. Thirty-five infants were tested at 3-month intervals between 4 and 28 months of age with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and at 31 months of age with the Stanford-Binet; 25 infants were tested with the Bayley at 4 months and the Stanford-Binet at 31 months. Mothers of some infants in each group participated in the testing process. Between-subjects analysis on the Stanford-Binet revealed no effects for repeated testing or maternal participation. Within-subjects analyses for repeatedly tested groups demonstrated that maternal presence during testing, but not repeated testing, was associated with significantly higher Bayley scores. It was concluded that maternal presence is a potent influence on Bayley performance, that repeated experience with the Bayley biased neither performance on another standardized test of development nor subsequent Bayley performance, and that infant intervention programs are not likely to confound their evaluation designs by testing infants repeatedly.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1978

Fetal malnutrition: an experimental study of its consequences on infant development in two caregiving environments.

Infants from low socioeconomic status families were randomly assigned to an instructional day-care program designed to prevent socioculturally caused mental retardation or to a nonintervention control group. This assignment procedure resulted in an equal distribution of full-term, full-birth-weight, fetally malnourished babies in 2 environments varying in intellectually supportive characteristics. The condition of fetal malnourishment was defined by infants having low ponderal indices (PI). At 3 months of age low-PI infants showed lower Bayley Mental Development Index (MDI) scores than normal-PI infants, independent of the environment. In the control group low-PI infants still had lower MDI scores than normal-PI infants at 18 months of age. However, at that time in the day-care group, low-PI infants scored as well as normal-PI infants. These findings were replicated when the infants were 24 months of age with Stanford-Binet intelligence tests. Observations of mothers' involvement with their infants showed that, although all groups had similar amounts of maternal involvement when the babies were 6 months of age, the mothers of low-PI infants in the control group showed less involvement with their infants at 18 months of age than the other mothers. We suggest that this longitudinal study provides experimental evidence for a transactional model of development which emphasizes both newborn infant characteristics and environmental quality as cocontributors to the process of development.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1977

Assessing the intellectural consequences of early intervention with high-risk infants.

Infants at-risk for mental retardation were divided into a group that received early day-care intervention and a matched control group that did not. The purpose of the intervention was to prevent sociocultural retardation. Children were tested at 7 and 18 months on a simple two-choice visual-discrimination task and on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development to assess the impact of the intervention program on their development. Analyses revealed that the experimental group's performance was reliably superior to that of the control group on both measures and that experimental subjects scoring high on the Bayley Scales reached criterion on the discrimination task on fewer trials than low Bayley scorers. The relationship was particularly strong at 18 months.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1975

Infants' home environments: a comparison of high-risk families and families from the general population.

Home environments of 30 infants at high-risk for developmental retardation were compared with those of 30 infants from the general population (matched for age, sex, and parity) by means of the Home Observation Measurement of the Environment. Fifteen high-risk infants attended a day-care intervention program; 15 did not. The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment showed significant differences (ps less than .001) between the high-risk groups and the general population, favoring the general population, on all factors (maternal-warmth, absence of restriction and punishment, organization of the environment, appropriate toys, maternal involvement, and opportunities for variety) but none between the two high-risk groups.

Child Day Care Centers↗