Although parents are an essential element in treatment services for their child with autism, it can be expensive and time-consuming to teach them how to develop their child’s adaptive behaviors, especially if the family resides in a rural area. This research involves evaluating the effectiveness of an online training program to equip parents with knowledge and skills of empirically-based behavioral procedures to teach their child desirable behaviors. Not only does this online training program feature interactive internet instruction of basic content in behavioral psychology, but also synchronous web-based video interactions (parent rehearsal of techniques with their child and performance feedback provided by a qualified professional) to hone parents’ teaching skills. Systematic research, using a multiple probe research design, will be conducted in an iterative fashion to evaluate and replicate the effectiveness of this online parent training program. Parents’ knowledge and skills when implementing behavioral techniques and observations of the children’s behaviors will be measured before, during and immediately after the online instructional program with a two week follow-up. It is hypothesized that we will find greater parent knowledge test scores, greater accuracy in parents’ implementing teaching programs, greater child compliance with task demands, and fewer child problem behaviors following completion of the online training program compared to that before.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
