Teaching Paraprofessionals to Implement a Social Communication Intervention for Young Children with ASD

Children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) frequently lack social communication skills and researchers have developed evidence-based practices to address these deficits. More recently, researchers are examining paraprofessional use of these interventions when working directly with children with ASD. The author completed a review examining studies in which paraprofessionals were taught to implement a social communication intervention with young children with ASD. Researchers in the review studied paraprofessional use of naturalistic behavioral interventions with studies reporting an increase in paraprofessional treatment fidelity for the chosen intervention, and most reporting corresponding improved child outcomes. From this review, the author designed and completed research examining adult behavioral skills training for paraprofessionals in a manualized, naturalistic behavioral social pragmatic intervention from Project ImPACT (Ingersoll & Dvortcsak, 2010). Three Therapeutic Support Staff (TSS) were taught with online modules, in-vivo training and ongoing feedback to use interactive strategies to a predetermined frequency criterion with young children with ASD in the child’s home setting to improve child spontaneous communication. The TSS increased strategy use to criterion quickly with accuracy and generalized the strategies to snack time or the playground. The TSS also sharply decreased their use of questions and demands during playtime. Strategy use continued after intervention. Child spontaneous communication increased in frequency and moved from mostly eye gaze and gestures to eye gaze, vocalizations and a few words. The results indicate that a package combining online modules, in-vivo training plus ongoing feedback is effective in teaching TSS to use social communication strategies during playtime. This study furthers the concept of a target frequency for each strategy within a play session

Pre-Service Teachers’ Knowledge of Special Education Laws

As more and more children are being identified as needing special services, all teachers need to know special education laws. One hundred and thirty-eight preservice teachers answered an online survey about their knowledge and confidence level of IDEA and Section 504. Our participants, on average, did not have accurate knowledge of IDEA or Section 504 laws (overall IDEA X = 42%; 504 X = 40%). Having coursework related to IDEA and Section 504 laws did increase participants’ scores, regardless of whether they were majoring in a special education related degree or not. However, their scores were still low, basically at chance level. Having coursework related to IDEA and Section 504 laws also increased participants’ confidence in their scores. Except for participants who had not taken a class with Section 504 information, participants’ confidence levels were also associated with their scores. The qualitative data showed that the majority of the relevant responses were from participants who had had coursework on special education laws. Overall, the results showed a general lack of knowledge about specific details of these special education laws