Project Description:
Expenditures to date: $1,813,027
Expenditures this reporting period: $331,887
Expenditures remaining: $158,304
2016-2024
Division of Academic Quality and Workforce, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Autism Grant Program Parent-Directed Treatment. Coach to Communicate (C2C): Partnering to Improve Communication for Individuals with Autism. Award #27496. PD: Jay Ganz (July-August, 2023); Sanikan Wattanawongwan (September, 2023-current). $500,000. % FTE, 12 months. http://autism.tamu.edu/
Coach to Communicate (C2C) provides any Texas parents/caregivers of children with ASD (ages birth-22) with direct, intensive, and multi-context services via coaching parents, with whom they likely spend the most time, to provide interventions to address social-communication deficits. Parents attend an introductory webinar (self-paced), then may enroll in up to 12 weeks of individualized coaching.
The C2C project was funded, by this funding source, in late 2022 (began under prior funding in 2016, 2018, and 2020). Additional funding has been awarded, and will be received during the second half of 2024. To achieve the project goals during this reporting period, we have focused on recruiting parent-child participants and prioritizing families from low-SES backgrounds, families in rural areas, and those with children with more severe ASD throughout the state of Texas. The project website (autism.tamu.edu) was developed for potential parent participants to learn more about our project and find out how to register for participation. Helpful materials for parents are also posted to our website, as well as project publications and successes. We included a google translate function, so that parents can choose which language to view the website in to increase accessibility to non-native English speakers. During this reporting period, we also hosted several live online webinars, to offer more options to parents who preferred this format to asynchronous learning.
Access to evidence-based services for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families is spotty throughout the state of Texas. Low socioeconomic status (SES) families, English language learners, and military-connected families outside of major metropolitan areas are particularly at a disadvantage in accessing services. Moreover, children with ASD and severe communication disorders are among the most difficult to treat and have the highest need for intensive instruction to take place across all relevant settings, contexts, and communicative partners. Multimodal communication instruction is a strategy that allows children with ASD to develop communication skills. Telepractice parent coaching can be employed to increase parent implementation of evidence-based treatment for their children with ASD.
To address the social-communication needs of disadvantaged Texas children with ASD, the Coach to Communicate (C2C) project aims to provide parents and caregivers of children with ASD with direct, intensive, and multi-context services via coaching parents. Parent participants are instructed to implement a multimodal, naturalistic communication intervention to address their child's social-communication deficits. The project prioritizes serving parents from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, who are or who serve English Language Learners (services for parents are available in Spanish and Thai), who reside in rural areas, highly mobile military communities, and who serve/have children with severe ASD.
The self-paced online module is provided through Texas A&M University via Canvas (https://prep.catalog.instructure.com/) anytime to learn basic knowledge of evidence-based behavioral strategies and their applications for improving social communication. After the online module or the group parent training is completed, the assigned coach works with each family to set goals and develop treatment plans. Once completed, individual coaching sessions begin and data is collected on participant progress over the training for up to 12 weeks. Parent coaching sessions are implemented remotely via web-based conferencing, thereby increasing the accessibility of services for families in rural or low SES circumstances throughout the state of Texas
Building on a previous project with training designed for educators and service providers, we created a parent-specific training site, PREP Parents, for easier parent navigation. Along with the Coach to Communicate webinar, parents have access to 12 additional online training modules, with 2 new modules that will be added within the next month. The Coach to Communicate module, as well as 5 additional modules are also available in Spanish, and during this reporting period, a Thai version of the Coach to Communicate module became available. In August 2021, we also launched a Spanish-only Parent training platform, to make training more accessible to Spanish-speaking parents.
To enable easier access for parents who have difficulty completing the recorded webinar, we began offering a live Coach to Communicate webinar this year, and will continue through the future.
Unserved or Under-served Populations:
Racial or Ethnic Minorities, Disadvantaged Circumstances, Limited English, Geographic Areas, Rural/Remote, Urban, Specific Groups
