Zachary Charles LaBrot

Teaching prosocial skills in early childhood education settings has beneficial outcomes on immediate behavior change and long-term social-emotional and academic outcomes. However, early childhood educators are in need of effective, efficient, and feasible strategies to explicitly teach and reinforce young children’s prosocial skills, especially those who already struggle with social skills. Using a non-concurrent multiple baseline design, the research team investigated the effects of a novel intervention, Social Sprouts, on an individual child’s and class-wide display of positive peer interactions and disruptive behavior. Social validity data were also collected to better understand the teachers’ perceptions of feasibility, effectiveness, and acceptability. Results indicated an increase in both individual children’s and class-wide display of positive peer interactions, with less pronounced effects for disruptive behaviors. All three implementing teachers perceived Social Sprouts to be acceptable, feasible, and effective. These results highlight a promising and feasible class-wide intervention to be implemented in Head Start settings.

Across the nation, the academic and mental health needs of students are sharply increasing (Bommersbach et al., 2023; The Nation’s Report Card, 2025). This problem is further exacerbated a large di...

Youth diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder are at a higher risk for experiencing difficulties following instructions, which may lead to coercive interactions with caregivers and an increase in other challenging behaviors. However, parents often face significant barriers (e.g., transportation, long distances from clinics) accessing effective services to address these issues. To overcome these barriers, the current study evaluated the effectiveness of virtually delivered behavioral skills training with three parent‐child dyads for improving parents' use of effective instruction delivery to improve their children's response to instructions. Results indicated that all parent participants demonstrated an increase in accurate use of effective instruction delivery with concomitant improvements in children's response to instructions. These results were found to maintain for up to 5 weeks. Moreover, parents endorsed virtually delivered behavioral skills training and effective instruction delivery as an acceptable training procedure and intervention to improve instruction following, respectively. Results, implications, limitations, and future direction are discussed.

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display elevated levels of challenging behaviors and decreased social engagement. Parent Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) may help children with ASD increase rates at which they engage and interact with their caregivers. Existing barriers to treatment completion, including high attrition and travel time and costs, may be ameliorated by delivering PCIT virtually (iPCIT) and setting attainable mastery criteria. This study utilized a multiple baseline design across three caregiver-child dyads with ASD to determine whether an iPCIT protocol affected caregivers’ use of positive engagement skills, children’s engagement, and children’s challenging behaviors. Results demonstrated increased and improved caregiver-implemented engagement and behavior management practices with some improvements in child outcomes. These findings suggested that iPCIT is an effective treatment modality for teaching parents to increase and maintain their use of positive engagement skills across time. Without explicit instructions to avoid negative interaction behaviors, increases in positive engagement skills did not result in concomitant decreases in negative interaction behaviors. Increases in social engagement were observed for two children, but a decrease in engagement was observed in the third. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Positive greetings at the door (PGD) is a proactive classroom management strategy designed to target classroom transitioning into learning or an instructional activity. Positive greetings at the door help students engage in academic behaviors and reduce disruptive behaviors (DBs) that can otherwise delay the start of classroom instruction. This study used a concurrent multiple baseline design to evaluate the effects of a combined PGD and behavior-specific praise (BSP) intervention on student academically engaged behavior (AEB) and DB across three general education classrooms in the southern United States. Following the implementation of the combined PGD and BSP intervention, class-wide AEB immediately increased, and DB immediately decreased across all three classrooms. Additionally, teachers found the combined intervention to be socially acceptable. Implications for applied practice and research are discussed.

Program-wide Positive Behavior Supports (PW-PBIS) is a data-driven multitiered model of service delivery in which young children receive increasingly intensive supports to address their social–emotional and behavioral needs. PW-PBIS implementation in early childhood education has consistently been found effective for preventing a variety of undesirable outcomes while also promoting young children’s social–emotional and behavioral functioning. However, the literature examining the PW-PBIS model has often overlooked the impact of early adversity and trauma as factors on young children’s outcomes. Emerging studies have begun proposing a trauma-informed lens be implemented in early childhood education; however, the PW-PBIS model lacks clear guidelines on how to adapt interventions and supports at each tier to be trauma-informed. Therefore, using a trauma-informed lens, this paper aims to offer evidence-guided approaches to adapt the PW-PBIS framework. Practical trauma-informed adaptations of specific interventions and supports at each PW-PBIS tier will be described. Further, a data-based case example will be presented and discussed to illustrate the utility of a trauma-informed PW-PBIS model. The goals of this paper are to advise practitioners on how PW-PBIS can be adapted to be trauma-informed while also serving as a call to action for researchers to empirically investigate this model.