Effectiveness of Discrete Trial Training Program for Parents of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Discrete Trial Training (DTT) is one of many scientific based practices used in the education of children with ASD. It is seen that many evidence based practices are limited to the studies conducted by universities and cannot become widespread. Involvement of parents in their children’s education processes and utilization of evidence based practices play a very important role in overcoming the problems and achieving the desired results in children with ASD. In this study, the effectiveness of a group of family training programme, which has been developed to upskill parents to present DTT, was investigated on 14 mothers and 14 fathers. The result shows that there is a significant difference between experiment and control groups’ DTT scores. On the other hand there is no significant difference between mothers and fathers’ DTT performance in experiment group. Also children whose parents in experiment group improved imitation skills during the study. The parent training program has been found effective on teaching parents how to use DTT. All the parents indicated their satisfactions about the program and they also suggested the program to the other parents.