More on COMPASS…

What does the process look like?

COMPASS begins with an initial 3-hr joint session, with the parent and teacher, using the COMPASS Profile. For transition-age youth, they are included as well.

The COMPASS Profile assesses the child’s/student’s challenges and strengths related to social skills, adaptive/self-management, communication, problem behaviors, learning skills, and sensory avoidances and preferences by bringing together the team to obtain a holistic understanding of the child at home and at school. The COMPASS profile and the discussion that takes place help pinpoint critical social, communication, and work behavior/learning goals and inform the teaching plans that are generated for each goal. This helps ensure that the right goal is selected for the child and that the child’s intervention is personalized to the child based on his / her strengths, challenges, and preferences.

What happens after the first consultation?

Four teacher coaching sessions lasting about 1 hour each. Each session is standardized and allows for assessment of student goal attainment that is used for evidence-based teacher coaching including performance feedback monitoring and teacher instructional modification / self-reflection on the implementation of the teaching plans.

What happens during coaching?

Teachers and students provide a video or artifact (grades, diaries) to determine progress using psychometric equivalence tested goal attainment scaling (PET-GAS). Supportive problem solving occurs based on performance feedback and fidelity monitoring.

We invite you to build a Profile for your child or student. CLICK HERE to get started.

What is the evidence that COMPASS works?

We have research evidence of the effectiveness of COMPASS from four randomized controlled trials for improving educational outcomes and for improving parenting and child outcomes.

We first tested COMPASS for preschool and elementary age students as a consulting intervention to improve IEP outcomes and compared results with a group of students who received services as usual (control group). We found IEP outcomes doubled in COMPASS when evaluated by an observer unaware of the group assignment for the children (Ruble, Dalrymple, & McGrew, 2010). In a replication study, we tested COMPASS again with a new set of teachers and students and got similar results. But we also tested another group that received web-based coaching and found this approach to be effective (Ruble, McGrew, Dalrymple, Toland, & Jung, 2013). Overall, children who receive COMPASS make at least 1 standard deviation improvement over the comparison group. In other words, children who received COMPASS had goal attainment scores that were greater than 80% of children in the comparison group.

The third intervention COMPASS for Transition (COMPASS-T), was tested in an RCT with high school students in their final year of school with a focus on improving IEP and postsecondary outcomes (Ruble, McGrew, Toland, Dalrymple, Adams & Snell-Rood, 2018). A very large effect (2.1) was observed for IEP goal attainment outcomes based on an independent observer. This means that students who received COMPASS did better than more than 90% of those who did not receive COMPASS.

Next, we tested a parent-mediated version of COMPASS called COMPASS for Hope (C-HOPE). C-HOPE was designed for parents of children with ASD and challenging behavior. C-HOPE was effective for decreasing child problem behavior (p<.001); increasing parent competency (p=.02) and decreasing parent stress (p<.001) (Kuravackel, et al., 2018).