Telehealth general case parent training for children at risk for autism
Four telehealth lessons with varied examples teach parents to keep teaching new skills on their own.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Five families joined Zoom from home. Each toddler showed early autism signs.
Parents got four telehealth lessons. They learned to teach play, language, and self-help.
Coaches used video models, role-play, and live feedback. No extra help was given later.
What they found
Every parent hit 90 % correct steps by the end. Kids also used new skills more often.
Parents kept teaching new targets on their own. Skills they never practiced went up too.
Gains stayed high for six weeks with no booster calls.
How this fits with other research
McDevitt et al. (2026) also used BST over Zoom. They added mealtime chaos on purpose. Both studies kept parent scores high, so real-life noise does not break training.
Williams et al. (2023) showed parent drift returns when child problem behavior comes back. Shingleton-Smith’s parents held steady, likely because general-case training gave them more tools.
Lord et al. (1986) proved you can thin reinforcement and still keep behavior. The new study copies that move: parents kept teaching after the reinforcer (coaching) stopped.
Why it matters
You can run parent boot camp fully online. Teach many examples, then stop. Parents will still pick new targets and keep accuracy. Try it when travel is tough or slots are full. Record a few good lessons, mix examples, and let families go.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Parent-mediated interventions for infants and young children with an increased likelihood of autism may help ameliorate developmental concerns; however, generalization of parents' teaching strategies to novel child target skills has not been consistently demonstrated. This study expanded our parent training program, Parent Intervention for Children at-Risk for Autism (PICARA), by incorporating telehealth general case training (PICARA-TGCT) to promote generalization of teaching skills. Five parent-child dyads participated. Child target skills were chosen from the categories of imitation, receptive language, and expressive language. A concurrent multiple-baseline-across-participants design was used to evaluate the effect of training across two cohorts of parent-child dyads. Dependent variables included the percentage of correct parent teaching skills and the percentage of child correct responses. Parent teaching skills increased across all participants for both trained and untrained child target skills, as did child skills. This study provides support for PICARA-TGCT as an efficacious and efficient early intervention model.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2024 · doi:10.1002/jaba.2913