Existing reviews address important questions about subsets of practitioner training studies in special education but leave important questions about the broader literature unanswered. In this comprehensive review, we identified 118 peer-reviewed single-case-design studies in which researchers tested the efficacy of practitioner training on implementation of educational practices to students with disabilities. We found publication of studies has proliferated in recent years, and most studies involved a multiple-baseline or multiple-probe design, researchers as training agents, in-service special education teachers or paraprofessionals as trainees, and students with learning disabilities or autism spectrum disorder as recipients of intervention. Through visual analysis, we detected 521 effects out of 626 opportunities across studies. The mean d-Hedges-Pustejovky-Shadish effect size was d = 2.48. Behavioral-skills training was associated with the most consistent improvement of implementation fidelity. We found statistically significant associations between implementation fidelity and modeling, written instructions for implementation, and verbal performance feedback.
Recreational activities are an important part of anyone's quality of life, owing to the various benefits of participation (e.g., social, physical). For individuals with significant disabilities, engagement in leisure skills continues to be a low priority in many schools, which can adversely affect the level of school and community membership. This study used video prompting to teach leisure skills to nine students with significant disabilities. Video prompting was effective with all but one student. In addition, to explore whether leisure skill acquisition would lead to shifts in preference, this study examined leisure skill preference at pre-and postacquisition. The authors found a dramatic shift in students' preferences after they acquired new skills.
Video prompting has been demonstrated to be a successful procedure for teaching students with various disabilities to complete a variety of tasks. Traditionally, a video clip is only shown once before the student has an opportunity to engage in the step. Recent research has demonstrated that continuously showing the video in a loop can be an effective approach to video-based instruction. In the current study, we used a multiple probe across tasks design to evaluate the effects of continuous video prompting to teach a student with significant disabilities to complete three vocational tasks. Results demonstrated that continuous video prompting paired with error correction and additional training procedures was effective, although fading of the video prompts was not achieved. Areas for future research are addressed.
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