1. Early Childhood Play Interventions:
Special Education Honors Program Experience
Sarah Alfieri
• Research Question:
• Does the use of contingent imitation and play expansions increase levels of
engagement and complexity of block play for children with or at-risk for
disabilities and their peers?
• Participants:
• Four dyads consisting of a child diagnosed with a disability and a non-disabled
peer
• Setting:
• Discovery Lab at the Susan Gray School, a blended preschool affiliated with
Vanderbilt University
• Measures:
• Videos were coded for engagement, block complexity, number and types of
blocks used, and vocalizations related to block play
• Design:
• Multiple probe design across participants
• Description of Intervention:
• Baseline:
• After running several practice sessions in order to reach fidelity and IOA, the
graduate student implementers began baseline. Implementer would inform
students that they would be playing with blocks for ten minutes. During the
session, the implementer did not build anything and refrained from praising
students for their work. Instead, they provided several narrations about what
the students were doing and redirected off-task students to the blocks.
• Initial Intervention with Imitation and Play Expansions:
• Implementer would begin session by informing students that they would be
playing with blocks for ten minutes. The implementer would then imitate the
structures built by both students, drawing attention to the fact that their
structures were similar as often as possible. She would then expand the
structure and narrate the expansion. If the student imitated the expansion on
their own structure, he or she would be praised for his or her creativity.
Students were not to be praised for any other behaviors.
• Second Intervention with Visual and Verbal Prompting:
• Same as initial intervention, with the addition of visual and verbal prompting.
Implementers photographed several structures (houses, cars, football fields,
and farms) and instructed students to build a structure similar to picture.
Implementers would also verbally prompt students who stopped building to
continue and to explicitly label their structure.
• Individual Modifications:
• For some students, implementers added a system of least prompts, token
board, and reinforcers for target behaviors such as staying within desired part
of classroom and not knocking down structures prior to the end of the
session.
• General Findings:
• Engagement improved under initial intervention conditions and complexity
improved under second conditions.
• Roles and Responsibilities:
• While working on this study, I was responsible first for coding creativity,
complexity, and vocalizations using ProCoder. I was eventually switched to
fidelity coding, where I watched a selection of videos and evaluated whether or
not the implementers were correctly implementing the intervention.
Project 2: Naptime GroupProject 1: Block Play Intervention Study
• Overview:
• Three children attending the Susan Gray School who do not typically sleep during
naptime attended this group for alternate instruction
• Group consisted of an hour long lesson, with an art activity, literacy activity,
cooperative game, dramatic play, and free choice
• Group provides graduate students in early childhood special education with hands
on experience working with disabled children, in addition for a place for Dr.
Barton, other professors, and graduate students to conduct research
• Roles and Responsibilities:
• I assisted in running the group with a graduate student in early childhood special
education on Mondays, for one hour a week. This included providing
reinforcement, keeping students on task, and running activities.
Reflections
Project 3: Literature Reviews
For more information, please contact:
Sarah Alfieri
sarah.n.Alfieri@Vanderbilt.edu
• Generalization and Maintenance Review:
• Methods:
• Twenty-seven articles were identified by Dr. Barton as sources of information
for this literature review.
• I read each article thoroughly in order to determine whether or not response
generalization and stimulus generalization were facilitated and measured in
these articles. In order to do this, I answered a variety of questions on the
generalization and maintenance components of the identified studies on an
excel document created by Dr. Barton.
• General Findings:
• The study is currently in progress and the results will later be analyzed by Dr.
Barton, the lead investigator. Based on the initial information found, however,
current researchers are not doing a great job at including generalization and
maintenance components in their studies.
• Autism Spectrum Disorder Review:
• Methods:
• I conducted a search on ProQuest based on terms identified by Dr. Barton to
locate articles on interventions for children under the age of six who had been
diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
• The search originally came up with 1,479 articles which were narrowed down to
108 based on specific criteria (done after January 1, 1990, included children with
autism who were age 6 or younger, and included an intervention).
• Using the same criteria, but a more thorough reading, they were eventually
narrowed down to 80 articles.
• I then extracted data on each article on their participants, research design,
independent variables, and variables. This data was compiled into an excel
document and sent to Dr. Barton for analysis.
• The data compiled will eventually be used to determine whether or not
intervention studies on children with ASD are reporting and including children
with cultural and linguistic differences.
• General Findings:
• The study is currently in progress and the results will later be analyzed by Dr.
Barton, the lead investigator. However, based on my preliminary data
extraction, it does not seem like current studies are doing a great job of
reporting and including students with cultural and linguistic differences.
• Block Play Intervention Study:
• I found coding to be difficult and time consuming. Dr. Barton and I eventually
made the collaborative decision to move me off of creativity coding, as the five
hours a week I put into the study did not allow me to reach IOA with the graduate
student coders, who were required to put 20 hours into research a week.
• It was especially difficult to hear which child was vocalizing. In addition, the
graduate students and I occasionally disagreed on the complexity of the
structure.
• I found fidelity coding to be easier, as I was just focusing on the actions of the
implementer rather than the actions of the students.
• While coding, I witnessed many difficult sessions where problem behavior from
the children could prevent the implementer from reaching fidelity. These were a
perfect example of one of the reasons that research with children can be difficult:
children are unpredictable and can be uncooperative.
• Learning to code fidelity and creativity improved my ability to read and analyze
other research papers and to directly experience the amount of work and revision
that goes into completing a successful study.
• Naptime Group:
• This was my one opportunity to work directly with preschool children with
disabilities. I found that it could be very difficult to keep the students on task.
Some activities were difficult for certain students, making it more difficult to
complete the lesson. In addition, group dynamics played a large role in what we
were able to accomplish.
• Literature Reviews:
• Extracting the data for the literature reviews was a time-consuming and often
tedious process.
• I learned that writing a literature review is much more difficult than one may
expect, as it requires more data analysis and article searching than I had expected.
• Compiling information for the literature reviews also improved by ability to read
and analyze other articles.
• Final Thoughts:
• Participating in a large variety of projects allowed me to experience the many
aspects that go into educational research, many of which I had never considered
prior to my participation in the honor’s program.
• I have learned more about the amount of work that goes into conducting
research, and have ultimately found that I really do enjoy working with research.
Although I do not plan to continue with early childhood special education, I am
hoping to use what I learned through this experience in future research projects.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Barton, who ultimately provided me with a
variety of opportunities to be involved in research, in addition to providing me with
support throughout. My work in the honor’s program in special education would not
have been possible without her help. I would also like to thank Dr. Ledford, who
conducted the object play intervention study with Dr. Barton for giving me the
opportunity to participate in that study. I would like to thank all of the graduate
students in early childhood special education who trained me in coding and working
the naptime group. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Capizzi, who organized the projects
and allowed me to participate in the honor’s program, for all of her support and advice.