A Scoping Review of Studies Focusing on Professionals Providing Services for Young Children with Disabilities During The COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic transformed the service delivery by the professionals working with young children with disabilities as a result of the suspension of in-person services. This paper provides a scoping review of research articles carried out on the professionals providing services for young children with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also synthetizes the findings of research articles on the topic to identify the gaps and trends in this knowledgebase in order to guide further research. The guidelines on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) were followed. The studies were analyzed considering the year of publication, source of the country, distribution of the articles across journals, participants, methodology used, focus and the findings of the studies. Results indicated that most of the studies have investigated the challenges that the professionals encountered during the remote services, and how they adapted to remotely delivering the services. Limitations, implications for research and practice were also discussed.