Language-Literacy Intervention through Telepractice for School-Age Children: A Single Case Design Study

Abstract

Telepractice holds substantial promise in facilitating equitable access and cost-effective services for all school-age children, regardless of geographic locations, physical conditions, or socioeconomic status. The overwhelmingly positive evidence on telepractice intervention outcomes has been called into questions by several study limitations: flawed research design, inadequate measurement, and not documenting scoring reliability and treatment fidelity. Few studies examined the feasibility of delivering language-literacy interventions via telepractice to primary-school children. This study employed a single-case, multiple-probe design across four primary-school struggling readers to study the functional relation between a reading comprehension monitoring intervention Does It Make Sense and child self-corrections in independent oral reading. Participants completed two to three weekly, one-on-one therapy sessions via ZOOM across 7 to 10 weeks. The probe assessments included a 4-minute reading task and the CUBED Narrative Language Measures to characterize reading self-corrections and reading comprehension respectively. We reported evidence for a functional relation and adequate procedural fidelity and probe assessment reliability in support of the feasibility of delivering language-literacy intervention for school-age children via telepractice. Transferred effects on distal outcomes, participating families’ feedback, facilitating factors and barriers to telepractice are overviewed.