Naturalistic language interventions are commonly recommended to educators when teaching children to reliably share their wants, interests, and feelings with others. Recommendations include providing focused attention on a child and embedding multiple instructional opportunities within and across activities. Although such practices are commonly recommended, educators have multiple responsibilities throughout the day and need practical guidelines for implementing these relatively complex procedures in practice. The purpose of this review was to identify experimental studies where educators were trained to conduct naturalistic language interventions in schools for the purposes of improving verbal social communication in children with or at-risk for disabilities. We identified a total of 38 experimental studies published in 19 articles. Most studies were conducted by classroom teachers with children with autism spectrum disorder. Inadequate methodological rigor limited the applicability of findings for guiding educators in practice. Practical implications for evaluating naturalistic language interventions in schools are discussed.
This study serves as an initial attempt to establish content validity for graphs likely to be included in trainings targeting progress monitoring for professionals serving learners with or at risk for disabilities. We created a survey containing 32 graphic displays of hypothetical learner data. These surveys were administered to a sample of special education teachers, behavior analysts, higher education faculty, and related service providers. Survey respondents rated each graph on its likelihood of being encountered in practice and whether a graph depicted a therapeutic effect. Results indicated that graphs displaying a therapeutic effect were most likely to be encountered and that graphs with variable data in either a baseline or intervention condition were associated with incorrect visual analysis determinations. Implications of our findings are discussed with respect to personnel who develop and provide trainings on analyzing learners’ progress monitoring data.
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