Training Paraeducators to Use Time Delay to Teach Students with Moderate to Severe Disabilities

Research questions that will be addressed as part of this project include:

1. Will the paraeducator training program increase paraeducator use of time delay when prompting students during a known and unknown targeted task?
2. Will the paraeducators generalize the use of time delay with prompting to non-targeted tasks with the assigned student in other educational opportunities?
3. Will the paraeducators maintain the use of time delay with prompting after the training program is completed?

The participants will be three paraeducator pairs (two paraeducators in each pair) and the six students they routinely support. Paraeducator participants will work in a Baltimore City Public School/Kennedy Krieger Institute Partnership program at a Baltimore City elementary/middle school program for students with multiple disabilities, including moderate to severe cognitive delay.

Student participants will include one student that each paraeducator routinely supports. Students, ages five to 14, will attend a Baltimore City public school program and be diagnosed with a moderate to profound intellectual disability. Students in foster care will be excluded.

Students will participate in routine reading and math activities, with the paraeducator helping the student learn new skills as routinely done in the classroom. Paraeducators will participate in a three-component training program to learn to use time delay with most to least prompting and error correction, routine educational strategies used throughout the school, but with formal training in the strategies. Paraeducators will use the routinely used strategy, time delay with most to least prompting and error correction, but with formal training, to teach a new routine educational skill to the student they routinely work with.

The paraeducator will be aware that data is being collected on their use of time delay with most to least prompting and error correction through video while teaching this skill to the student. The paraeducators will also be asked by their supervising teacher to teach another new routine educational skill to the student, as is routinely done by supervising teachers. Data will also be collected on the paraeducators' use of time delay with most to least prompting and error correction while teaching this skill to the student, but the paraeducator will not know that this data will be collected.