Tertiary First Step to Success

School interventions judged as effective for students with severe behavioral concerns require a well-designed and intensive family component that attends carefully to parent engagement, motivation, and follow through. Motivational interviewing is a burgeoning approach to more effectively influence parents’ engagement and behavior change. Over the past four years, the developers of the First Step to Success intervention, a well-established secondary prevention program for students with challenging behavior in preschool through third grade, have been engaged in an iterative development process to create enhancements to the program that extend the range of the intervention. This presentation describes the process by which motivational interviewing was infused into the home component of the intervention, summarizes the intervention procedures, and presents results of a feasibility study. For the feasibility study, we employed a quasi-experimental design. Process data and parent- and teacher-reported outcomes and observational outcomes were collected for all participants in the Tertiary First Step condition  (N = 33). Parent- and teacher-reported outcomes were collected for a comparison sample (N = 22). For our between-subject analyses, Hedges' g effect sizes for our three pro-social outcomes ranged from .36 to 1.11.  Effect sizes for the teacher- and parent-reported problem behaviors ranged from -.77 to -1.17. For our within-subject analyses, effect sizes for the academic domain were .25 for academic competence and .82 for direct observations of academically engaged time. Observations of social behavior revealed effect sizes of .42 and .53 for positive and interactions, respectively. For the parenting-related outcomes, mean scores on the parental distress subscale decreased from 26.70 (SD =10.80) at baseline to 24.00 (SD = 8.90) at post-test (partial r = .34; small effect size).  Mean scores on the parental distress subscale decreased from 26.70 (SD =10.80) at baseline to 24.00 (SD = 8.90) at post-test (partial r = .41; medium effect size). Process data suggest the intervention was implemented with fidelity, and that teachers, parents, and coaches perceived the intervention as socially valid. The study results provide compelling evidence that the Tertiary First Step intervention is promising for improving student outcomes on social-behavioral indices, decreasing problem behavior, and improving academic engaged time.