Presented by Pat Mirenda, PhD, BCBA-D; Paola Colozzo, PhD, RSLP; Veronica Smith, PhD; Wendy Ungar, PhD and other members of the PACE Coaching team.
The findings of this recently concluded 3-year research project, carried out in partnership with child and family development agencies across BC, has important implications for supporting parents and communities with effective early intervention for toddlers with special needs.
About the Event
This presentation will provide information about the lessons learned from the Parent And Child Early Coaching project (PACE), conducted in collaboration with child development centres and Aboriginal agencies in 16 BC communities from 2018-2020.
Included will be discussions of:
The early signs of autism and the importance of early diagnosis.
Parent coaching and how it differs from other types of parent-child support for toddlers with social communication delays
What the research tells us about the effectiveness of this approach
The PACE Coaching research team will describe how the parent coaches involved in the project were trained and what the outcomes were. Contributions from the coaches themselves and their training facilitators will be featured.
The research study and a related project for Aboriginal families, Parent-Child Connections, will be outlined. Parents and community partners who participated in these studies will join the research team to talk about their experiences.
In the final session, presenters will talk about the implications of the PACE Coaching project for service delivery in BC. This will include a discussion of the costs, benefits, and challenges of including parent coaching as an early intervention option to support the social and communication development of young children.
Primary Presenters
Pat Mirenda, PhD, BCBA-D
Dr. Mirenda is Professor Emerita in the Department of Educational & Counseling Psychology and Special Education and past Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration in Autism at UBC. She was the Principal Investigator in the PACE Coaching project.
Paola Colozzo, PhD, RSLP
Dr. Colozzo is an Associate Professor and speech-language pathologist in the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at UBC. She was a Co-Investigator in the PACE Coaching project and was primarily responsible for assessment training, monitoring, scoring, and coding.
Veronica Smith, PhD
Dr. Smith is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Alberta. She was a Co-Investigator in the PACE Coaching project and was primarily responsible for assessing the factors that contributed to and affected implementation.
Wendy Ungar, PhD
Dr. Ungar is a Senior Scientist in Child Health Evaluative Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children and a Professor in Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. She was a Co-Investigator in the PACE Coaching project and was primarily responsible for conducting a comparative cost analysis.
Cost/Fund/Bursaries
ACT’s free events are supported by donations. If you’ve benefited from one of ACT’s free events and would like to make a contribution that allows ACT to continue providing free web streams, please consider making a donation.