The rising rate of the autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has resulted in challenges for teachers in public schools, concerning the delivery of evidence-based practices for superior outcomes. Thus, school districts are in need of professional learning options that can be efficiently and effectively delivered to improve the procedural fidelity of interventions. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the effectiveness of using telepractice to teach autism teachers how to contrive motivating operations to teach manding to students with ASD. By utilizing multiple baselines across participants design, four autism teachers in public schools received intervention support through an online module along with video models as well as direct performance feedback from autism specialists via video-conferencing. The primary dependent variable was the percentage of correct responses from the instructional procedures of task analysis, and the secondary measure was the subsequent rate of student mands. Data were analyzed both visually (i.e., through the study of behavioral patterns) and statistically (i.e., analysis of effect size). Results indicate that telepractice increased accuracy of both teacher and student target responses.

A primary task of adolescence and young adulthood is to form and develop healthy romantic relationships. While the importance of sibling and romantic relationships have been examined separately, only recently have researchers begun to explore links between the two. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the connection between romantic competence and sibling relationships, especially sibling warmth and sibling conflict, as well as the role of sibling gender constellation in college-aged young adults. This study aimed to examine (a) whether there is an association between sibling relationship quality, such as sibling warmth and sibling conflict, and perceived romantic competence, and (b) the role of sibling gender constellation on the relationship between sibling relationship quality (sibling warmth and sibling conflict) and perceived romantic competence among undergraduate students. Correlation analyses indicated there was no statistically significant correlation between sibling warmth and perceived romantic competence (p > .05), whereas sibling conflict was statistically negative correlated with perceived romantic competence (p < .01). While sibling gender constellation did not have an interaction effect with sibling conflict on perceived romantic competence, which means sibling gender constellation did not have a moderating effect on the relationship between sibling conflict and perceived romantic competence. Limitations …

Poor post-school outcomes for young adults with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have underscored the need to gain insight into the use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in the planning and implementation of transition services. EBPs for effective transition planning and implementation have been documented in the literature but do not appear to be fully utilized in practice to achieve desired student outcomes, reflecting a research-to-practice gap. EBPs have the potential to produce positive outcomes at the high school level, if implemented with fidelity. Special education personnel, especially administrators, play a vital and unique role in transition planning. They can either facilitate or hinder the process. This phenomenological study investigated the perceptions of public school administrators regarding the extent of their awareness of EBPs to ensure the successful transition of students with ASD and associated barriers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 secondary-level public school administrators. Major themes identified through analyzing the qualitative data included (a) a positive vision for students with ASD, (b) characteristics of a good transition program, (c) administrators' roles in the transition process, (d) barriers to EBP implementation, (e) strategies to reduce barriers, and (f) ownership of what administrators can do to remedy the problem. Lastly, the …

Ordinal coefficient alpha is a newly derived non-parametric reliability estimate. As with any point estimate, ordinal coefficient alpha is merely an estimate of a population parameter and tends to vary from sample to sample. Researchers report the confidence interval to provide readers with the amount of precision obtained. Several methods with differing computational approaches exist for confidence interval estimation for alpha, including the Fisher, Feldt, Bonner, and Hakstian and Whalen (HW) techniques. Overall, coverage rates for the various methods were unacceptably low with the Fisher method as the highest performer at 62%. Because of the poor performance across all four confidence interval methods, a need exists to develop a method which works well for ordinal coefficient alpha.

Previous studies highlighted the importance of parental support for development of mastery of control and depressive symptoms. These studies tended to examine one time wave and outcomes related to that period, forwarding an assumption parenting behaviours do not change as children age. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-Children and Young Adults, this study filled the gap by examining children's supportive environment at three time points and determining how levels of support across these points impacted children's depression and mastery at 18 years of age. Relative stability of mothers' supportive parenting (i.e., encouragement of social maturity, warmth and affection, and physical punishment) at early childhood, middle childhood, and early adolescence was examined by Kendall's tau correlations. Encouragement of social maturity showed relative stability between early and middle childhood and middle childhood and early adolescence; warmth and affection showed relative stability between early and middle childhood, and physical punishment showed relative stability across all time points. Absolute stability was examined using hierarchical linear modelling and Wilcoxon signed-rank test. No instances were found. Latent class growth analysis identified different trajectories of supportive environment among participants and three groups were identified. Multiple regressions conducted to examine how different trajectories affect late adolescents' …

The common practice for testing measurement invariance is to constrain parameters to be equal over groups, and then evaluate the model-data fit to reject or fail to reject the restrictive model. Posterior predictive checking (PPC) provides an alternative approach to evaluating model-data discrepancy. This paper explores the utility of PPC in estimating measurement invariance. The simulation results show that the posterior predictive p (PP p) values of item parameter estimates respond to various invariance violations, whereas the PP p values of item-fit index may fail to detect such violations. The current paper suggests comparing group estimates and restrictive model estimates with posterior predictive distributions in order to demonstrate the pattern of misfit graphically.