Mary Adrianopoulos (Project Director) and Mary Lynn Boscardin (Project Co-Director) have been awarded a five year $1.25 million grant through the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, to train SLP masters students to work in public school classrooms as SLP specialists in the assessment and intervention of children with Autism. The focus of this training project will be to expand the personnel preparation training masters program in SLP at UMass-Amherst to include the use of technologies, specifically a Telehealth / Telepractice platform, to deliver SLP services to students with a wide array of communication disorders from diverse backgrounds, including e-Supervision, e-Consultation in real-time, and professional development of practitioners and educators in the field. The objectives of this project are to: prepare SLP graduates over five years with the specialized knowledge, skills, and experience to assess and manage children with speech and language disabilities in the schools with a focus Autism; expand our masters SLP specialty training program in the use of Telepractice as a reliable and valid service delivery model in collaboration our well-established school partners; demonstrate and provide evidence-based practices, student progress monitoring, inclusive and collaborative teaching environments, and response to intervention models appropriate to improve and maintain outcomes and achievement among students with ASD; and
disseminate our state-of-art knowledge and empirical data regarding training of SLP specialists and in the use of Telepractice technologies.
