Parent training: acquisition and generalization of discrete trials teaching skills with parents of children with autism.
Brief BST coaching gives parents durable DTT skills that spread to untaught targets.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kleinert et al. (2007) taught two parents of kids with autism to run discrete-trial teaching (DTT).
The team used BST: short lessons, live demos, role-play, and on-the-spot feedback.
They tracked parent accuracy across three child skills in a multiple-baseline design.
What they found
Both parents hit 80-a large share DTT accuracy after about six training hours.
Parents kept the skill when teaching new, untrained targets—no extra coaching needed.
How this fits with other research
Dai et al. (2025) extends the idea: hospital staff start DTT, then parents run it at home for three months. Their RCT shows the same parent coaching core plus added stress-reduction gains.
Settanni et al. (2023) also extends, but swaps intensive BST for low-intensity WHO group classes in community halls. Child gains still track caregiver skill improvement, matching the 2007 link between parent competence and child progress.
Sanberg et al. (2018) keeps the parent-training format but targets bedtime instead of DTT. Both studies show parents can master and keep new protocols with brief coaching.
Why it matters
You can teach parents to run solid DTT in under a week. Once fluent, they generalize to new targets without more of your hours. If you run clinic-hospital programs, pair staff sessions with take-home parent coaching like Dai et al. (2025). If time is tight, borrow the WHO low-intensity model and still watch caregiver skills drive child gains. Either way, invest in BST steps—show, practice, feedback—because the payoff lasts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examined the effects of an intensive parent training program on the acquisition and generalization of discrete trial teaching (DTT) procedures with two parents of children with autism. Over the course of the program, parents applied the DTT procedures to teach four different functional skills to their children, which allowed for an assessment of "free" and programmed generalization across stimulus exemplars. Parent training was conducted by the first author utilizing instructions, demonstrations, role-play, and practice with feedback. Parents' use of DTT skills and children's correct and incorrect responding were measured. A within-subject multiple-baseline across stimulus exemplars (functional skills taught) design was employed both to demonstrate control of the training program over parents' correct use of DTT, and to allow a preliminary investigation of the generalized effects of training to multiple stimulus exemplars. Results demonstrate initial control of the training program over parent responding, and the extent to which each parent extended her use of DTT procedures across untrained and topographically different child skills. The potential for designing more generalizable and thus more cost-effective parent training programs is discussed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2007 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2005.10.003