19186
Evaluation of a Parent-Response Scale to Measure the Progress of Children with ASD in State Early Intervention Programs
Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, state early intervention (EI) programs, which serve children birth to age three, are required to report annually on the developmental progress made by enrolled children in three broad outcome areas: social relationships, acquisition and use of knowledge and skills, and taking action to meet their needs. A key indicator of program performance is the percentage of children with developmental delays who make substantial progress in these areas. However, states are not required to disaggregate their child outcomes data by type of developmental delay or diagnosis. Therefore, the extent to which children with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are making progress in response to state EI services is unknown. This is particularly important in that children with ASD represent a growing percentage of the children served in state EI programs.
Objectives:
To evaluate the psychometric properties of a parent-report scale addressing the impact of EI services on the developmental progress of children with ASD.
Methods:
Items for the Impact on Child Scale - ASD Version(ICS-ASD) were developed through a Concept Mapping process conducted with a diverse set of EI stakeholders that included substantial representation of family members of a child with ASD. The 83 items used in this research are displayed in the attached Table; all items used the same 6-point response scale, from 1=very strongly disagree to 6=very strongly agree. The ICS-ASD items, along with other parent measures, were sent to a research sample of 204 families of a child with ASD who was diagnosed either prior to or during participation in the New York State Early Intervention Program. Responses to the ICS-ASD were received from 167 participating families around the time that their child transitioned out of the EI program. Measurement analyses were conducted through the Rasch framework using WINSTEPS (Linacre, 2003) data analysis software. Scale reliability and principal components analysis were conducted using SPSS.
Results:
Cronbach’s alpha for the 83-item ICS-ASD was .99. Point-measure correlations for the items ranged from .66 to .83. Item mean square infit statistics ranged from 0.62 to 1.67, with values for all but 10 items between 0.70 and 1.40. A principal components analysis indicated that all the items loaded substantially (.62-.92) on the first component, which explained 72% of the variance. Five other components together explained an additional 10% of the variance.
Conclusions:
Findings of this study suggest that the ICS-ASD yields reliable measures of the extent to which parents report that EI helped their child with ASD achieve key developmental outcomes. Work is currently under way to examine the validity of the ICS-ASD as a measure of the overall developmental progress of children with ASD in EI. For state accountability purposes, the ICS-ASD represents a highly cost-effective data source that can inform program improvement efforts. Its use also reinforces the importance of family members’ participation in the evaluation of EI services for young children with ASD.