Bruce A. Bracken

Children’s formative development is most critical during the preschool years. It is during the earliest years of a child’s life when the fundamental building blocks of learning, cognitive development, academic achievement, information processing, language, and interpersonal skills are acquired and developed. Preschools are well suited to shape children’s overall health and well-being, with burgeoning research demonstrating a relationship between early life experiences and subsequent adult health. Preschool and quality daycare provide rich opportunities for children’s learning, yielding long-lasting and significant effects. Comprehensive preschool assessment sheds light on aspects of the whole child, providing early identification of potential problems and the subsequent development of evidence-based interventions to address delays in development. The following chapter will provide a rationale for preschool assessment, identify specific domains in need of consideration, and promote the systematic linkage of established interventions to promote children’s intellectual functioning, academic achievement, information processing, and skill development.

This article presents a historical description of and research related to the development, validation, and combined use of the multiple editions of the Bracken Basic Concept Scale and its companion curriculum, the Bracken Concept Development Program. In tandem, the scale and curriculum were designed to assess and teach more than 300 basic language concepts that are fundamental to understanding and describing the world in which young children live. Basic concepts are represented in early childhood educational standards across all 50 states, and this article provides the theoretical and practical basis for understanding conceptual domains, subcategories, and the manner in which psychologists and early childhood educators can effectively assess and teach these concepts.

This study considered depressive symptoms among a normative sample of 1,900 children, adolescents, and adults (950 males and 950 females) divided across four age-levels to investigate the developmental progression of depressive symptoms by age, race/ethnicity, and gender. The national normative sample of the Clinical Assessment of Depression (CAD) was used in this study, which provided a large, reliably assessed, representative sample for group comparisons. CAD age, gender, race/ethnicity analyses revealed that depressive symptoms appear to be experienced at fairly uniform levels across the age-span, by both genders, and among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. Specific differences within age, race, and gender groups and interactions are discussed.

This study queried practicing school psychologists in the United States about the extent to which advances in the field have improved their individual service provision and fostered a desire for additional professional development. The researchers surveyed 1,000 members of the largest professional organization for school psychologists in the United States (NASP) and examined 336 survey respondents' perceptions as a total sample and by demographic subgroups. The results highlight the uniformity of US psychologists' perceptions, nationwide, regardless of respondents' demographic characteristics. The researchers conclude that school psychologists should more actively advocate for and influence the direction of future training initiatives and local, state, national and international organizations should provide professional development in alignment with the needs of practicing psychologists.