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Year Awarded: 2008
Project Leaders:
Brooke Ingersoll, Psychology, Summer Ferreri, Special Education, Vonnie Vanderzwagg, Ottawa Area Intermediate School District
Project Description:
Children with autism have pervasive deficits in social interaction and communication skills and exhibit inflexible and repetitive behaviors that interfere with learning and disrupt family life. The educational needs of these children are significant and the majority of early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) programs struggle to provide the recommended number of hours of intervention. Parent training has been shown to be a cost effective intervention that leads to improved generalization and maintenance of child skills as well as decreased parent stress and depression. Although parent training is considered an essential component of successful intervention programs for children with autism (NRC, 2001), it is rarely included in EI/ECSE programs for children with autism due to a lack of goodness-of-fit between current individualized models and classroom settings as well as a lack of appropriate teacher preparation in parent training strategies. This project will use a switching replications design to examine the effectiveness a 9-week parent training curriculum designed for use in a classroom setting. It will examine the ability of the program to teach special educators to provide coaching to families of children with autism. It will also assess changes in the parents' use of the intervention strategies and the children's social-communication skills. Finally, it will assess the feasibility of implementing this program in ECSE settings. The findings will contribute to the knowledge base of effective intervention for young children with autism.
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