Purpose: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience challenges with facial emotion recognition (FER), which may exacerbate social difficulties in ASD. Few studies have examined whether FER can be experimentally manipulated and improved for autistic people. This study utilized a randomized controlled trial design to examine…

When randomized control trials are not possible, quasi-experimental methods often represent the gold standard. One quasi-experimental method is difference-in-difference (DiD), which compares changes in outcomes before and after treatment across groups to estimate a causal effect. DiD researchers often use fairly exhaustive robustness checks to…

Multisite trials that randomize individuals (e.g., students) within sites (e.g., schools) or clusters (e.g., teachers/classrooms) within sites (e.g., schools) are commonly used for program evaluation because they provide opportunities to learn about treatment effects as well as their heterogeneity across sites and subgroups (defined by moderating…

Longitudinal randomized controlled trials generally assign individuals randomly to interventions at baseline and then evaluate how differential average treatment effects evolve over time. This study shows that longitudinal settings could benefit from "Recurrent Individual Treatment Assignment" ("RITA") instead, particularly in…

RCTs in primary schools in rural China show frequent personalized teacher feedback improves exam scores for Grade 3 (age 9), including those 'left behind' by migrating parents. Two terms of biweekly feedback increase math and language scores by 0.15 standard deviations, with an RCT texting results to parents giving 0.26 sd extra math improvement…

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are an increasingly common research design for evaluating the effectiveness of community college (CC) interventions. However, when planning an RCT evaluation of a CC intervention, there is limited empirical information about what sized effects an intervention might reasonably achieve, which can lead to under- or…

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are an increasingly common research design for evaluating the effectiveness of community college (CC) interventions. However, when planning an RCT evaluation of a CC intervention, there is limited empirical information about what sized effects an intervention might reasonably achieve, which can lead to under- or…

Background: There is a growing body of evidence showing the benefits to coaches and players in adopting a game-based pedagogical approach. Whilst the evidence in support of a game-based pedagogy continues to rise it is acknowledged that the complex art form of coaching is a uniquely personal one, where the coach may draw on previous first-hand…

Robotic therapies are receiving growing interest in the autism field, especially for the improvement of social skills of children, enhancing traditional human interventions. In this work, we conduct a scoping review of the literature in robotics for autism, providing the largest review on this field from the last five years. Our work underlines…

Considerable thought is often put into designing randomized control trials (RCTs). From power analyses and complex sampling designs implemented preintervention to nuanced quasi-experimental models used to estimate treatment effects postintervention, RCT design can be quite complicated. Yet when psychological constructs measured using survey scales…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and preintervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

Prompts are commonly used during discrete trial teaching for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Three commonly used prompting systems include constant time delay, most-to-least prompting, and flexible prompt fading. Most of the research demonstrating the effectiveness of these three prompting strategies have been completed…

Technology-assisted parent-mediated interventions improve accessibility and are acceptable but not proven to be effective. We conducted a systematic search of 6 databases. We included and analysed results from studies on social and communication outcomes. Sixteen Randomised-Controlled-Trials (RCTs) with 748 participants were included. Most studies…

We conducted a systematic review to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and single case research design (SCRD) studies of children with autism spectrum disorder that evaluate the effectiveness of responsivity intervention techniques for improving prelinguistic and/or language outcomes. Mean effect sizes were moderate and large for RCTs…

Motivational interviewing (MI) is applied in a variety of clinical and coaching models to promote behavior change, with increasing interest in its potential to optimize school-based implementation fidelity. Yet there has been less consideration of fidelity indicators for MI-embedded coaching and links to outcomes. We leveraged secondary data from…