An Interprofessional Graduate Student and Family Coaching Program in Naturalistic Communication Techniques

Researchers implemented a short-term cascading coaching model focusing on naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention with three participant triads. Triads consisted of a graduate student clinician, a minimally verbal child with autism spectrum disorder, and the child's parent. Coaching and intervention occurred during an interprofessional summer clinic that included graduate student clinicians from special education and speech and hearing sciences departments. The efficacy of short-term instruction, researcher coaching for student clinicians, and student clinician coaching of parents was evaluated using a multiple baseline across participants' design. The dependent variables were student clinician's and parent's use of elicitation techniques (creating communication temptations, waiting, and prompting) and response techniques (naturally reinforcing children's communication and providing spoken language models). Following coaching, parents and student clinicians from all triads increased their use of elicitation and response techniques, with very large effect sizes across all variables. Visual analysis findings suggest individualized differences and variability across triads. Implications for graduate education and parent coaching programs are discussed.