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Primary Submission Category: Infants/children/youth
Crucial Role of Practitioner Progress Monitoring Measures for Optimizing Early Communication
Authors:Â Laura Saddi, Kathleen Baggett,
Presenting Author: Laura Saddi*
Background: Public health benefits of parent mediated interventions to optimize child communication are often unrealized because they fail to reach children in the first 2 years of life, due in part to practitioners’ lack of feasible progress monitoring measures to assess whether interventions are working as intended. We present results of a unique study that employed validated practice progress monitoring measures, allowing us to address questions about the effects of intervention on parent facilitator behaviors (the mechanism of intervention change as measured by the Indicator of Parent Child Interaction), and whether varying levels of post-intervention parent positive facilitators differentially predicted child communication as measured by the Early Communication Indicator.
Methods: We analyzed data from an Australian population-based, cluster RCT in which 161 parent-toddler dyads were assigned to either a standard control (group-sessions on general parenting matters), a Smalltalk-only (playgroup program), or a Smalltalk Plus (playgroup program and 6 early childhood home visits on child communication promotion strategies for parents). Analytic approaches included ANCOVA to assess treatment by time effects on parent facilitator behavior and ANOVA to assess effects of low, moderate, and high tertiles of parent positive facilitators on child communication rates.
Results: Significant treatment by time differences with large effects on positive facilitators were found for parents in the Smalltalk Plus group as compared to parents in the Smalltalk-only and control groups. Post-intervention parent positive facilitator level differentially predicted child communication rate with large effect sizes.
Conclusion: Findings underscore the need for inclusion of progress monitoring measures in implementation research and practice for increasing public health reach and impact for optimizing child communication.