Family-centered practices that involve direct participation of caregivers as part of intervention is critical to effective early intervention. However, regularly scheduled, in person service delivery is not always possible in remote communities, prompting a need for adaptations to the delivery of services, such as the use of live video conferencing to coach caregivers in strategies to promote their children's development. In this study, caregivers and their children ages 2–9 with autism who were living in rural and remote Canadian communities were included. A concurrent multiple baseline design across participants was applied to examine the effects of live video conference caregiver coaching on children's time jointly engaged with caregivers and caregivers' intervention strategy implementation. Results indicated that all children demonstrated greater time jointly engaged and caregivers demonstrated greater use of strategies in comparison to baseline. The results of this study offer preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of real time video conference coaching for caregivers engaging their children with ASD in play.
Purpose:
Technology-enabled adaptations of efficacious in-person early intervention programs for young children with autism spectrum disorder have the potential to conserve resources while increasing access to specialized educational services. Usability testing of online programs can support participant engagement by aligning program navigation and content presentation with the needs and preferences of the target end users.
Method:
The project includes formative work to develop a technology-enabled adaptation of the evidence-based caregiver-mediated Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation (Kasari et al., 2010) social communication intervention to be delivered by community-based early interventionists and early childhood special educators who are serving families of young children with autism in rural and remote communities. Usability testing included two components: (a) Think Aloud real-time feedback interviews (Davison et al., 1997) and (b) completion of the System Usability Scale (Sauro, 2011). The measures were conducted to explore the stakeholders' interactions with the system.
Results:
Feedback was largely positive indicating that the online materials were straight forward to navigate, the content was valued, visuals enhanced the experience, and multiple methods to access information (e.g., listen or read) were appreciated. Suggestions for improvement included adding further video examples, reducing page scrolling, and making some activities optional (e.g., text boxes, multiple-choice questions).
Conclusions:
Overall, participants smoothly navigated through the pilot materials. Revisions are being implemented to incorporate the participants' feedback.
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