School districts are struggling to provide educational services and meet the needs of a large number of children with ASD. Rethink Autism (RA), a web-based platform to train school staff, assess children, implement ABA-based curriculum, and track children's development, provides a promising alternative to this challenge. The goal of this proposal is to assess the effectiveness of RA on teacher performance and children's outcomes within middle school, self-contained settings. A quasi-experimental, non-equivalent groups design will be used for the study. A total of 18 classrooms, composing three groups serving children with ASD, will be included in the study. (1) The first group will receive the RA program, (2) the second group will receive the RA program and coaching from an autism specialist, and (3) the third group will receive the Failure Free Reading curriculum and will constitute the business as usual model (BAU) used by Broward County Public Schools. In order to assess the effective of RA with and without coaching in comparison to the BAU model, child and teacher level measurements will be administered. Inferential statistics will be used to analyze the effectiveness of RA with and without coaching support. Both teacher and student level factors will be studies to assess the effective of the different educational models. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures will be performed.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
