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Children with developmental disabilities (DD) may experience delays in their ability to speak and communicate with their parents, peers, and others. These children often benefit from evidence-based, parent-implemented communication interventions. In the current study, two mothers were trained and coached to use storybook reading techniques and evidence-based naturalistic communication teaching strategies (i.e., modeling, mand-model, and time delay) while reading books with their children with DD. Using a multiple-baseline design across naturalistic teaching strategies, the following three components were examined: (a) mothers’ use of book reading techniques, (b) mothers’ rate and fidelity in using the three naturalistic teaching strategies, and (c) children’s communication outcomes. After training and coaching, the mothers used the modeling, mand-model, and time delay strategies with higher rates and higher fidelity. The children initiated more communicative acts upon their mothers’ use of time delay. The mothers reported that the training and coaching helped them implement the strategies and led to improvements in their children’s communication skills.

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Ms. Glass is working with her kindergarten student, Angela, on expressive communication. Angela has significant communication delays and has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Although she is making progress, Ms. Glass is worried that her gains will not generalize to different contexts. Ms. Glass thinks Angela and some of her peers will benefit from working on expressive communication at home in everyday routines. However, teaching Angela's parents to use communication teaching strategies is difficult, as Ms. Glass and Angela's parents have overlapping work schedules. Ms. Glass wonders if there is another way to provide Angela's parents with targeted support so they can, in turn, support Angela's communication at home.

The authors examined the extent to which practices for parent participation in early intervention/ early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) programs. The role of parents in the EI/ECSE is important and supported through the literature. The changing traditional family picture in the classrooms, the importance of evolving laws and regulations and recommended practices regarding parent participation are highlighted. The conceptual framework is based on the children, parents, and practitioners' outcomes. Strategies to promote family involvement provided a direct way to understand how early childhood education programs influence family participation. Practices to promote family participation are discussed.

We retrospectively analyzed data from a pilot study that examined the impact of the Internet-based Parent-implemented Communication Strategies (i-PiCS) program (Meadan et al. in Journal of Early Intervention, 2016) on two families whose children primarily used unaided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The purpose of this analysis was to explore possible explanations for discrepant findings between behavioral data and social validity data in single-case research. These divergent findings were revealed when we attempted to mix two methods to make assertions about intervention effectiveness. Guided by two hypotheses, we recoded the original pilot study video recordings by introducing new dependent variables that were linked to information gleaned from the social validity assessment (i.e., self-reports by the parents and interventionist). After assessing these new dependent variables, we found support for improvement produced by the i-PiCS program that had not been identified in the original observational recording. We present the methods and results of this secondary analysis and discuss the potential value of using mixed methods to combine observational behavioral data with self-report social validity data in behavioral research. Keywords Communication intervention . Parent training . i-PiCS . Augmentative and alternative communication . Mixed methodsIn single-case research, knowledge is generated by observing and measuring behavior (Kazdin 2011). However, in 1978, Montrose Wolf suggested that the exploration of the experiences of the people whose behavior we measure also generates knowledge, J Dev Phys Disabil (2016) 28:113-134

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