Treino de Cuidadores via Telessaúde para Implementação de Ensino Incidental a Crianças com TEA

Abstract

Given the growing prevalence of individuals diagnosed with ASD and the shortage of qualified professionals in the market to meet the demand of this population, training parents/caregivers has been one of the practices under the supervision of the Behavior Analyst, promising to help meet this need. Recent research has focused on using increasingly innovative training approaches that demand less time of behavior analysts dedicated to face-to-face training. A possibility that has been explored is Telehealth. Which has been shown to be effective for distance training. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of a training package composed of Instructional and Interactive Video Modeling, Self-Monitoring via Checklist and Delayed Feedback, through Telehealth, to teach parents/caregivers of children with ASD to implement Incidental Teaching (EI) to teachmand skills (making orders) and listening skills (following instructions). Four caregiver-child dyads and one professional-child dyad participated in the study. A design of multiple probes between participants was used, with control of the insertion of the independent variable throughout the performance of the participants, and a control of the order of presentation of the components of the package was also carried out to compare their effect on the performance of the participants. All participants in this study showed increased accuracy of performance at the end of the intervention compared to baseline data. However, exposure only to the components “Instructional and interactive video modeling” or “Self-monitoring via checklist”, or a combination of them was not enough for the performance of the participants to reach the precision criterion established in the study. Then, it was necessary to use delayed feedback via videoconference for all participants, from which the precision criterion was reached. Based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that training for caregivers through Telehealth using the package of the present study plus delayed feedback, shows promise for an effective and less costly behavioral analytic intervention.