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Despite federal mandates to transition students with disabilities to successful adulthood, outcomes have been poor. Although areas of occupational therapy expertise, such as life and work skills, are effective in improving transition outcomes, occupational therapy personnel rarely provide transition services. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of occupational therapy transition readiness services for students with disabilities, 14 to 16 years of age, over two academic years of intervention. Forty-two students and 14 occupational therapy personnel from 10 school districts participated. Assessments were provided to transition teams. Peer groups explored work and life skills and completed long-term student-led projects. Pre–post scores of functional behavior were analyzed using a proportional change index. Students receiving occupational therapy transition readiness services demonstrated statistically significant gains. Occupational therapy holds potential to increase the functional readiness of students with disabilities for transition to a successful and productive adult life.

Supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) to thrive requires careful consideration of multiple avenues of community involvement. Yet little attention has focused on the place of faith community participation in the lives of adults with IDD. We examined attendance at religious services using National Core Indicator data for a sample of 12,706 adults with IDD residing in 24 states. Almost half of adults (48.3%) reported attending a religious service in the past month, and more than one third (34.6%) attended 3 or more times. Religious involvement varied considerably based on a variety of individual (e.g., race, disability type, behavioral support needs, communication mode) and contextual factors (e.g., geographic locale, residential type). Moreover, monthly involvement in religious activities was much less common than participation in other community activities (i.e., exercise, entertainment, eating out, shopping). We offer recommendations for supporting the spiritual lives of adults with IDD, as well as highlight areas for future research and practice.

Electronic handsets have been rapidly miniaturized in form factor and developed with highly integrated functions, more complexity, and significantly improved performance. Within high density radio frequency (RF) modules, electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues such as unwanted cross-talk among the RF modules in mobile devices, cause electrical performance shifts, and make the modules more susceptible to electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) failures. All of these have raised considerable and critical challenges to RF design, which lead to a greater number of design iterations, prolonged design cycle times, and additional costs in a highly competitive market place. EMC has to be addressed during RF module design and package assembly by minimizing EMI radiation, reducing coupling paths, designing proper shielding, and grounding. The principle of EMI shielding is known as Faraday cage. This paper presents an overview of package level EMI shielding, where a metal layer is applied to partially or completely enclose a package in order to reduce the amount of EMI energy escaping into the external environment and also limit the EMI radiation that can penetrate into the package. Various EMI shielding techniques are compared and contrasted in terms of materials, process complexity, manufacturability, cost and EMI shielding effectiveness. Near-field EMI measurement/characterization is used to precisely capture EMI emission from device to system level or vice versa. The electromagnetic modeling methodology is used to pinpoint the root causes of unwanted EMI radiation on the module level.

Background: Previous research has suggested that individuals with closed head injury (CHI) have difficulty with the communication skills required for a successful conversational exchange. A variety of analysis paradigms have been used with this population and provide evidence to support that conversational discourse deficits do exist in individuals with CHI. However, the use of various analytical procedures renders it difficult for researchers to draw consistent conclusions and hinders the development of evidence-based practice guidelines for conversational discourse evaluation or treatment for individuals with CHI. Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate two conversational discourse analysis procedures. It was hypothesised that modifying a Conversational Appropriateness paradigm used successfully in previous research would provide additional information about conversational ability ultimately leading to more conclusive results. Methods & Procedures: A series of conversations elicited from one ind...

Data from a statewide billing and information system for early intervention are used to examine the influence of multiple factors on the level and intensity of services provided in a state early intervention system. Results indicate that child and family factors including entry age, gestational age, Medicaid eligibility, access to third party insurance, and children's developmental skill areas influence the level and the intensity of early intervention services provided. In addition, findings show that county demographic factors also influence service provision, specifically the interaction between rural and poverty status. Implications for social policy are discussed.

Results are reported from a national validation survey of early childhood and early childhood special education professionals and family members related to guidelines for implementing accountability systems at the preschool level. Of the 47 statements included on the survey, 43 were validated by 75% or more of the 299 respondents. Specific implications for state and local programs involved in developing or refining accountability processes are presented in the areas of standards, assessment, and general accountability system design.

Background Greater epidemiologic understanding of the relationships among fetal-infant mortality and its prognostic factors, including birthweight, could have vast public health implications. A key step toward that understanding is a realistic and tractable framework for analyzing birthweight distributions and fetal-infant mortality. The present paper is the second of a two-part series that introduces such a framework. Methods We propose estimating birthweight-specific mortality within each component of a normal mixture model representing a birthweight distribution, the number of components having been determined from the data rather than fixed a priori. Results We address a number of methodological issues related to our proposal, including the construction of confidence intervals for mortality risk at any given birthweight within a component, for odds ratios comparing mortality within two different components from the same population, and for odds ratios comparing mortality within analogous components from two different populations. As an illustration we find that, for a population of white singleton infants, the odds of mortality at 3000 g are an estimated 4.15 times as large in component 2 of a 4-component normal mixture model as in component 4 (95% confidence interval, 2.04 to 8.43). We also outline an extension of our framework through which covariates could be probabilistically related to mixture components. This extension might allow the assertion of approximate correspondences between mixture components and identifiable subpopulations. Conclusions The framework developed in this paper does not require infants from compromised pregnancies to share a common birthweight-specific mortality curve, much less assume the existence of an interval of birthweights over which all infants have the same curve. Hence, the present framework can reveal heterogeneity in mortality that is undetectable via a contaminated normal model or a 2-component normal mixture model.

Background Greater epidemiologic understanding of the relationships among fetal-infant mortality and its prognostic factors, including birthweight, could have vast public health implications. A key step toward that understanding is a realistic and tractable framework for analyzing birthweight distributions and fetal-infant mortality. The present paper is the first of a two-part series that introduces such a framework. Methods We propose describing a birthweight distribution via a normal mixture model in which the number of components is determined from the data using a model selection criterion rather than fixed a priori. Results We address a number of methodological issues, including how the number of components selected depends on the sample size, how the choice of model selection criterion influences the results, and how estimates of mixture model parameters based on multiple samples from the same population can be combined to produce confidence intervals. As an illustration, we find that a 4-component normal mixture model reasonably describes the birthweight distribution for a population of white singleton infants born to heavily smoking mothers. We also compare this 4-component normal mixture model to two competitors from the existing literature: a contaminated normal model and a 2-component normal mixture model. In a second illustration, we discover that a 6-component normal mixture model may be more appropriate than a 4-component normal mixture model for a general population of black singletons. Conclusions The framework developed in this paper avoids assuming the existence of an interval of birthweights over which there are no compromised pregnancies and does not constrain birthweights within compromised pregnancies to be normally distributed. Thus, the present framework can reveal heterogeneity in birthweight that is undetectable via a contaminated normal model or a 2-component normal mixture model.