Teaching Therapeutic Support Staff to Implement NDBI Strategies for Children With ASD Using Behavior Skills Training

Abstract

We examined adult behavioral skills training (BST) for home-based therapeutic support staff (TSS) using a naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention (NDBI) with young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) derived from Project ImPACT. We taught three TSS to use interactive strategies with online modules, in-vivo training, and ongoing feedback to a predetermined frequency criterion with young children with ASD in the home setting. The TSS increased strategy use to criterion and generalized the strategies to other settings. Child spontaneous communication increased in frequency and complexity from mostly eye gaze and gestures to eye gaze, vocalizations, and words. Our results extend what we know about training direct service providers and measuring social communication components.