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The Effects of a Bug-in-Ear Coaching Package on Implementation of Incidental Teaching by Paraprofessionals in a K-12 School

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Abstract

Paraprofessionals play a critical role in the instruction of students with disabilities and yet they often receive inadequate training in using evidence-based teaching strategies. A promising avenue for improving paraprofessional training is distant bug-in-ear coaching (BIE), where a paraprofessional receives in-the-moment coaching on a teaching strategy from a coach at a different location. This study examined a BIE coaching package to support paraprofessionals in using incidental teaching for teaching self-advocacy skills to students with disabilities. The package included an initial individual didactic teaching session followed by distance BIE coaching. A multiple-baseline across participants design was used to assess the impact of the intervention on both the skills of the paraprofessionals and on student acquisition of self-advocacy statements. BIE coaching was associated with increases in both the accuracy and rate of incidental teaching trials and with use of self-advocacy statements by the students with disabilities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, University of Washington, Box 357925, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Nancy E. Rosenberg, Kathleen Artman-Meeker, Elizabeth Kelly & Xueyan Yang

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  1. Nancy E. Rosenberg
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  4. Xueyan Yang
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Correspondence to Nancy E. Rosenberg.

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Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Team D Education; IRB ID: Study 00001094) and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Rosenberg, N.E., Artman-Meeker, K., Kelly, E. et al. The Effects of a Bug-in-Ear Coaching Package on Implementation of Incidental Teaching by Paraprofessionals in a K-12 School. J Behav Educ 29, 409–432 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-020-09379-1

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