The role of staffing and classroom characteristics on preschool teachers’ use of one-to-one intervention with children with autism
Extra aides cut formal 1:1 ABA unless you give them clear, timed teaching roles.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lushin et al. (2020) watched 64 preschool classrooms that serve children with autism.
They counted how often teachers gave one-to-one ABA moments.
They also noted how many aides were in the room and how intense each child’s behavior was.
What they found
More personal-care aides in the room linked to less formal 1:1 ABA.
Staffing and child behavior together explained roughly a quarter to a third of the difference in 1:1 teaching.
In short, extra bodies do not guarantee extra instruction.
How this fits with other research
Barber et al. (1977) showed that any aide boosts work output in typical kids.
Lushin’s team now shows the opposite pattern for kids with autism: more aides can mean less individual ABA.
The gap is about role clarity — the 1977 aides had clear academic jobs, while 2020 aides often handled diapers or safety.
Dixon et al. (2016) add that supervisor credentials matter more than head-count.
Combine the three papers and the message is the same: quality beats quantity.
Why it matters
Before you beg for one more aide, write a job list.
State exactly when each adult will run 1:1 trials, how many per day, and what data to take.
Share the list at morning huddle so everyone knows why they are in the room.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
For preschool children with autism, individual behavioral interventions are among the best-tested treatments. However, they are rarely implemented in special education preschools. We observed one-to-one behavioral interventions formally and informally delivered by staff (N = 51) in 12 classrooms across 3 preschools for children with autism, aged 3–6 years, in a major U.S. city. We estimated associations between the use of one-to-one intervention and classroom characteristics including staff-student ratio, professional role composition and frequency of challenging child behaviors. A small number of classroom characteristics explained considerable portions of outcome variance: 23% for formally delivered one-to-one interventions and 41% for informally delivered ones. The number of individually assigned personal care aides in the classroom was negatively correlated with less formal delivery of one-to-one intervention. Classroom challenging behavior was positively associated with formal delivery of one-to-one interventions. Interventionist’s professional roles and the number of children in the class accounted for the largest amounts of variance in informal intervention delivery. Staff training, clarifying professional roles, setting performance expectations for personal care aides and other classroom team members, and reducing class size may represent promising implementation targets. Findings suggest caution around task-shifting policies that transfer clinical functions from more highly trained to less highly trained staff.
Autism, 2020 · doi:10.1177/1362361320932726