Ensuring Treatment Fidelity

Some preschool children experience substantial difficulties saying speech sounds and being understood by others. They may receive intervention from a speech-language pathologist to help them increase their intelligibility. The intervention procedures require a high level of treatment fidelity, the implementation of detailed protocols to support consistent and effective treatment. Treatment fidelity is imperative while conducting research to maintain consistency and provide thorough procedures for future interventionists utilizing and replicating the research. The research questions are how to develop a checklist that outlines the procedures and documents accountability and credibility for treatment delivered in a group setting within a specialized clinic for preschool children ages 3-5 with a speech sound disorder and what are they key components of treatment fidelity. We collaborated with the clinical educator and graduate student clinicians who delivered the treatment to provide insight on the specific intervention procedures throughout the session. The procedural checklist reviews intervention practices of the speech clinic, training requirements, and session procedures that thoroughly described the treatment plan. The fidelity checklist provided a score of the outlined expectations of the intervention. The raw score yielded the percentage of consistent practice conducted. Using the checklist, coders observed a sample of recorded sessions to document the treatment fidelity of the procedures that were implemented. During this presentation, the treatment fidelity checklist that was developed, and the results of the scores across sessions will be presented. In addition, future strategies for improving the delivery of treatment procedures will be discussed.