Project Description:
Expenditures to date: $2,283,938
Expenditures this reporting period: $197,619
Expenditures remaining: $0
2016-March, 2026
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 #00839. PD: Julie Thompson. $500,000. % FTE, 12 months. http://autism.tamu.edu/
Coach to Communicate (C2C) provided 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 attended an introductory webinar (self-paced), then had the option to enroll in up to 12 weeks of individualized coaching.
The C2C project was funded by this funding source in mid-2024 (began under prior funding in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2024). 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. 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. 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 Texas children with ASD, the Coach to Communicate (C2C) project aimed to provide parents and caregivers of children with ASD with direct, intensive, and multi-context services via coaching parents. Parent participants were instructed to implement a multimodal, naturalistic communication intervention to address their child's social-communication deficits.
The self-paced online module was 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 was completed, the assigned coach worked with each family to set goals and develop treatment plans. Once completed, individual coaching sessions began and data was collected on participant progress over the training for up to 12 weeks.
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 had access to 14 additional online training modules.
To enable easier access for parents who had difficulty completing the recorded webinar, we began offering a live Coach to Communicate webinar during this grant.
Keyword(s):
Developmental Disabilities, Parent training, Autism, Parent-directed, Telepractice
