Breakout Session
Measuring Big Gains in Little Voices: Introducing the ECI-A for Autistic Infants and Toddlers
2-2:50 p.m. BEST 135
Presented by: Jay Buzhardt, PhD, Juniper Garden Children's Project; Lashanna Brunson; Project Coordinator; Juniper Gardens Children's Project; Susan Higgins, Project Coordinator; Juniper Gardens Children's Project; Sara Diaz de Villegas, Research Associate, Juniper Gardens Children's Project
There are limited observational measures of social communication in autistic infants and toddlers that are both designed for practitioners and sensitive to intervention effects over time. To address this need, we adapted the Early Communication Indicator (ECI), a brief play-based assessment of infant-toddler expressive communication, to measure communication outcomes often targeted by early intervention for young autistic children.
The new measure, the ECI-A (ECI-Autism), is a 10-minute play-based observation between the child and a familiar adult that captures the same key skills as the ECI-gestures, vocalizations, single words, and multiple-word phrases-plus the child's initiation of joint attention and the quality of directed communication. We are currently validating the ECI-A with families primarily from Kansas, Missouri, and North Carolina.
In this presentation, we will:
- Describe the ECI-A's administration and scoring guidelines;
- Discuss its feasibility and acceptability with diverse families, including Latino and African-American families;
- Present inter-rater reliability in terms of Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) values; and
- Examine children's growth trajectories on the ECI-A subscales, including expressive communication, initiated joint attention, and directed communication.
- Finally, we will highlight implications for practice, particularly the measure's use in data-driven decision-making.