Implementation of a Teacher Classroom Program to Support Preschool Children With Autism or Developmental Problems

Teachers' attendance at the sessions will be regeristered weekly with a sheet of attendance, with the aim to determine levels of compliance and engagement with the intervention. An attendance of at least 4/6 sessions is expected, with a minimum of 50% of teachers finishing the program.

Teachers' compliance and satisfaction with the intervention will be assessed weekly after each session with the questionnaire "Incredible Years Teacher Weekly Evaluations", which is part of the IY-HPCA® program materials.

This weekly assessment asks teachers to rate their satisfaction with different aspects of the program.

Teachers' acceptability and satisfaction with the program will be assessed with the Final Participant Satisfaction Questionnaire-Helping Preschool Children with Autism Program (included within the IY-HPCA® program). Data will be collected after the last session of the intervention.

Individual interviews will be conducted after the last session of the intervention to explore from a qualitative perspective: (1) teachers' acceptability, satisfaction and overall experience and perceptions of the intervention, and (2) teachers' perceived changes in their skills after the intervention.

Outcome measurements 3 and 4 will be combined to determine teachers' experiences, acceptability and satisfaction with the program.

Fidelity with the program will be assessed weekly after each session with the "Leader Checklist", which is part of the IY-HPCA® program materials. Group leaders (clinicians) will complete the Leader Checklist.

Individual interviews will be conducted after the last session with clinicians who delivered the intervention.

The Teacher Strategies Questionnaire for Children with Autism (TSQ-A) is a 52-item teacher-report questionnaire part of the IY program materials that consists of six sections. The first section asks teachers to rate their confidence in promoting social, emotional, language and academic development of children with ASD. Sections 2-4 ask teachers to rate the frequency with which they use teaching techniques to support children's language, social and emotional development. In the last section, teachers rate the frequency of their planning and support strategies according to a five-point scale.

The Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale-Long Version (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001; Spanish version: Salas-Rodríguez et al., 2021) is a 24-item questionnaire that measures teachers' evaluations of how likely they are to be successful in teaching. Three different subscales are differentiated: efficacy for classroom management, efficacy to promote student engagement, and efficacy in using instructional strategies.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (Maslach et al., 1986) is a version of the original Maslach Burnout Inventory for use with educators, including teachers, and has three scales that examine the three core aspects of burnout: emotional exhaustion (feelings of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work), depersonalization (unfeeling and impersonal response toward recipients of one's instruction) and personal accomplishment (feelings of competence and successful achievement in one's work with students).