Evaluation of emailed prompts to promote generalization and maintenance of preschool teachers' effective instruction delivery

Abstract

Young children's noncompliance with adult instructions has the potential to lead to a variety of other internalizing and externalizing difficulties that impact learning, behavior, and overall development. Although a variety of effective intervention strategies exist, early childhood teachers may not be well equipped to consistently implement these strategies to prevent and address young children's noncompliance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of a novel teacher implementation support, emailed prompts, to promote early childhood teachers' effective instruction delivery with three children referred for noncompliance and related challenging behaviors. Results indicated that all three teachers increased their accuracy of effective instruction delivery with concomitant improvements in children's response to instructions, including compliance. Furthermore, data suggested that all three teachers spontaneously generalized effective instruction delivery to other non-referred children in their classrooms. Results, implications, and limitations are discussed.