Adapting measures of motor imitation for use by caregivers in virtual contexts: Reliability, validity, and sensitivity to change.
Brooke Ingersoll, Mya Howard, Devon Oosting and 5 others
PMID 39569704WHAT IT FOUND
Caregivers could reliably administer two imitation assessments at home over Zoom while a virtual assessor coached them for children with early signs of autism.
Scores tracked with parent-reported imitation and language, and predicted expressive language growth over 9 months.
Key findings
01Average fidelity was 94% for virtual assessors and 97% for caregivers on You Do It, and 94% for virtual assessors and 94% for caregivers on Copy Cat.
02In 55 children, baseline You Do It and Copy Cat each predicted expressive language growth over 9 months, and each explained an additional 7% of variance.
03In 64 children in the RIT-later group, You Do It scores rose from 46.40 to 54.84 and Copy Cat scores rose from 32.03 to 42.84 between the first and second assessments.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
No in-person or examiner-administered imitation tests were compared, so the virtual measures were not validated against the original tests. There was no comparison group of neurotypical children or children with other developmental conditions. All children were under 30 months at enrollment, so performance in older children is unknown. Autism was not confirmed at entry; among 104 children with completed diagnostic evaluation, 89% received an autism diagnosis. Stability, predictive, and change analyses used only subsets (55 or 64 children). Not all analyses used the full sample; item analysis included 166 children for You Do It and 162 for Copy Cat. No short-term test-retest reliability was examined. Data collection was still ongoing. You Do It had lower internal consistency (0.63) and fewer items than Copy Cat.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health under NIH grants 1 R01MH122725-01, 1 R01 MH122726-01, 1 R01 MH122727-01, and 1 R01 MH122728-01; authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the score improvements in the RIT-later group as evidence that Reciprocal Imitation Teaching worked. Those children had not received the RIT intervention yet, and this study evaluated measurement properties, not treatment effects.