Parent empowerment and coaching in early intervention: study protocol for a feasibility study.
A soon-to-come toolkit may turn Project ImPACT graduates into active parent coaches, and early cousins of the idea already show strong fidelity gains.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Heald et al. (2020) wrote a recipe for a four-phase pilot. They will give community clinicians a digital toolkit after Project ImPACT training. The goal is to see if the kit helps the clinicians actually coach parents of toddlers with autism.
The study will run in regular early-intervention clinics. The team will watch each clinician with a single-case design. They have not yet posted child or parent scores; this paper is only the plan.
What they found
Nothing yet. The authors only share their step-by-step protocol. Real data are still being collected.
How this fits with other research
McGuire et al. (2025) already showed the coaching idea works. They trained bilingual grad students in English, then let the students coach Spanish-speaking caregivers. All adults learned the NDBI moves and the kids gained language. Their success makes the toolkit in M et al. look promising.
Bearss et al. (2022) pushed the toolkit idea into elementary schools. They reworked the RUBI parent program for teachers of 5- to young learners. Staff said the new RUBIES plan was easy to use. This school version is a direct sequel to the early-intervention toolkit.
Zhu et al. (2020) took a different road. Instead of a kit, they gave BCBA trainees remote Zoom feedback. The feedback alone lifted caregiver-coaching fidelity. Their remote method could clash with the toolkit plan, but the two tactics can live side-by-side: some clinics may prefer a paper kit, others a weekly Zoom call.
Why it matters
You already know that parent coaching works, but getting staff to do it is hard. M et al. will test a light, low-cost toolkit that any early-intervention agency can copy. While you wait for their numbers, borrow pieces from the neighbors: add a short Zoom check-in like Zhu et al., or cascade training through bilingual staff like McGuire et al. Start small—one clinician, one family—and track fidelity with a simple checklist.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
<h4>Background</h4>Parent-mediated early interventions (EI) for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can result in significant improvements in children's cognitive ability, social functioning, behavior, and adaptive skills, as well as improvements in parental self-efficacy and treatment engagement. The common component to efficacious parent-mediated early interventions for ASD is clinician use of parent coaching and occurs when a clinician actively teaches the parent techniques to improve their child's functioning. Available evidence suggests that community-based EI clinicians rarely coach parents when working with families of these children, although specific barriers to coaching are unknown. This consistent finding points to the need to develop strategies to improve the use of parent coaching in community EI programs. The purpose of this community-partnered study is to iteratively develop and pilot test a toolkit of implementation strategies designed to increase EI clinicians' use of parent coaching.<h4>Methods</h4>This study has four related phases. Phase 1: examine how EI clinicians trained in Project ImPACT, an evidence-based parent-mediated intervention, coach parents of children with ASD. Phase 2: identify barriers and facilitators to clinician implementation of parent coaching by administering validated questionnaires to, and conducting semi-structured interviews with, clinicians, parents, and agency leaders. Phase 3: partner with a community advisory board to iteratively develop a toolkit of implementation strategies that addresses identified barriers and capitalizes on facilitators to improve clinician implementation of evidence-based parent coaching. Phase 4: pilot test the feasibility and effectiveness of the implementation strategy toolkit in improving EI clinicians' use of parent coaching with nine EI clinicians and parent-child dyads using a multiple-baseline-across-participants single-case design.<h4>Discussion</h4>Completion of these activities will lead to an in-depth understanding of EI clinicians' implementation of parent coaching in usual practice following training in an evidence-based parent-mediated intervention, barriers to their implementation of parent coaching, a toolkit of implementation strategies developed through an iterative community-partnered process, and preliminary evidence regarding the potential for this toolkit to improve EI clinicians' implementation of parent coaching. These pilot data will offer important direction for a larger evaluation of strategies to improve the use of parent coaching for young children with ASD.
, 2020 · doi:10.1186/s40814-020-00568-3