Howard Goldstein, PhD

Howard has maintained a steadfast commitment to intervention research for 40 years. He sought to develop and evaluate interventions to teach functional social, language, and literacy skills to individuals with a variety of disabilities. He has engaged in research across the life span, but his primary focus has been on early intervention and prevention, especially in the following areas:

• Embedding interventions focusing on language, vocabulary, and phonological awareness skills into shared book reading
• Effects of vocabulary and phonological awareness intervention on preventing reading disabilities in at-risk children in low income schools
• Observational learning and generalization processes in language learning
• Peer-mediated interventions to promote social communication in children with autism and other developmental disabilities in inclusive preschools

Currently, he is investigating school- and home-based interventions to improve language and literacy outcomes in children with developmental delays in high poverty communities. Dr. Goldstein and his collaborators continue to work on developing a model for identifying at-risk children early so we can provide a multi-tiered approach to preschool instruction that targets language, emergent literacy, and socio-emotional skills that are critical to school success. Through iterative intervention development, their small-scale studies inform revisions and refinements in their treatments, their measurement schemes, and their implementation tactics. Their larger experiments seek to scale up interventions within existing systems to evaluate effects in authentic settings and to engineer sustainable interventions.