Mark Innocenti Portrait

Mark Innocenti

Director, Research and Evaluation Division

Dr. Innocenti is a Research Associate Professor at the IDRPP and is semi-retired. He was previously Director of the Research and Training Division at the Institute for Disability Research, Policy & Practice, a University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities.  Dr. Innocenti has 40 years of experience working with infants and young children at-risk and with disabilities and their families through multiple research and model demonstration projects. His approach to issues is based on an interdisciplinary model that recognizes the contribution of different disciplines and stakeholders. He has emphasized research conducted in and for communities.  He has served as Principal Investigator on a number of research projects including the ten-year Longitudinal Institute on the Effects and Costs of Early Intervention for Children with Disabilities and the Bilingual Early Language and Literacy Support (BELLS) Project. He was Principal Investigator for the NIH funded  Cache County site of the National Children’s Study and now the ECHO project.  Other research projects have examined various aspects of intervention and outcomes for families and children in early intervention, in Head Start, and in "at-risk" environments. Dr. Innocenti also has extensive experience in model demonstration and training projects that have examined areas such as social interaction, child transition, naturalistic intervention, parent-child interaction, and service systems. He has been an evaluator for a number of projects. Recent projects focus on development of assessment measures and curriculum, home visiting, preschool as a means to prevent later special education needs, and evaluation.  He is an author of the book, Developmental Parenting.  He is a developer of the PICCOLO (Parenting Interaction with Children:  Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes), a measure of the parent-child interaction, and the HOVRS (Home Visit Rating Scale), a measure of home visitor behavior.  He is very active training programs in the developmental parenting model and the use of the PICCOLO and HOVRS tools. Dr. Innocenti serves on a number of editorial boards for professional journals. He has served on a variety of advisory boards for both local and national groups.  He was on the Board of Directors for the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC). He is the Past-President for the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) of CEC.  He was a midcareer fellow with Zero to Three from 1999-2000.