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CompletedNCT05240222SC-PIESUpdated Feb 15, 2022

Pre-Implementation Enhancement Strategy To Improve Teachers' Intention to Implement Evidence-Based Practices

An interventional study of Pre-implementation enhancement strategies (SC-PIES) and Sham comparator in Child Behavior Disorders, Implementation Science and Adolescent Problem Behavior at School, sponsored by University of Iowa. Completed. Open to participants aged 22 Years to 70 Years, including healthy volunteers. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2022-02-15.

Sponsored by University of Iowa · Not applicable, Interventional, and Health services research

From the registry’s dates

  • Registered 5 years 5 months after the study started (first participant enrolled Jul 2016, registered Jan 2022).
Phase
Not applicable
Study type
Interventional
Enrollment
43
Allocation
Randomized
Ages
22 Years to 70 Years
Sex
All
01

Study summary

Background: As the most common setting where youth access behavioral health services, the education sector frequently employs training and follow-up consultation as cornerstone implementation strategies to promote the uptake and use of evidence-based practices (EBPs), which are often insufficient to produce desired implementation outcomes (e.g., intervention fidelity) and changes in youth behavioral health outcomes (e.g., reduced externalizing behaviors). There is a need for theoretically-informed pre-implementation enhancement strategies (PIES) that increase the yield of training and follow-up consultation. Specifically, social-cognitive theory explicates principles to inform the design of strategy content and specific mechanisms of behavior change, such as intentions to implement (ITI), to target via a PIES that increase provider to more active implementation strategies. Methods: This triple-blind randomized controlled trial preliminarily examined the efficacy of a pragmatic PIES (SC-PIES) to improve the implementation of universal EBPs in the education sector. Participants were randomly assigned to the treatment (PIES) or active control condition (meeting with administrators). The investigators assessed participants' ITI, intervention fidelity, and youth behavioral health outcome before, immediately after, and six-week following treatment.

Read the detailed description
  1. Background and study aims:

    As the most common setting where youth access behavioral health services, the education sector frequently employs training and follow-up consultation as cornerstone implementation strategies to promote the uptake and use of evidence-based practices (EBPs). However, these strategies alone are not sufficient to promote the desired implementation (e.g., intervention fidelity) and youth behavioral health outcomes (e.g., externalizing behaviors). Theory-informed pragmatic pre-implementation enhancement strategies (PIES) are needed to increase the yield of training and consultation. Specifically, social-cognitive theory explicates principles to inform the design of strategy content and specific mechanisms of behavior change (e.g., "intentions to implement"; ITI) to target to increase providers' responsiveness to training and consultation. This triple-blind parallel randomized controlled trial preliminarily examined the efficacy of a pragmatic PIES based on social-cognitive theories (SC-PIES) to improve the implementation and youth outcomes of universal EBPs in schools. Four aims will be examined:

    1. As compared to control, does the pre-implementation enhancement strategy based on social-cognitive theories (SC-PIES) significantly improve teachers' implementation intentions to implement PCBM practices at posttest after adjusting baseline and covariates?
    2. As compared to control, is receiving SC-PIES associated with significantly improved teachers' intervention fidelity and class-wide youth behavioral health outcome at the 6-week follow-up after adjusting for baseline and covariates?
    3. Does teachers' intention to implement mediate the association between study condition and intervention fidelity?
    4. Does teachers' intervention fidelity mediate the association between their intentions to implement and class-wide youth behavioral health outcomes?
  2. Who can participate? Any teacher who has no prior training about or experience of implementing Proactive Classroom Behavioral Management Strategies (PCBM) targeting youth behaviors in a school district. No restriction on age, gender, experience, or other demographic variables.
  3. What does the study involve? The participating teachers will be randomly assigned to either the treatment (SC-PIES) or active control condition (administrative meeting). The SC-PIES was delivered to teachers as a one-hour professional development session immediately before receiving specific training about evidence-based PCBM practices and subsequent follow-up consultation. Teachers in the active control condition will meet with their administrators to talk about their work irrelevant to SC-PIES or student behaviors. The investigators assessed teachers' ITI, intervention fidelity, and youth behavioral outcome (academic engagement as an incompatible behavior to externalizing disorders) before treatment, immediately after training, and six weeks afterward.
  4. What are the possible benefits and risks of participating? Teachers participating in this study will benefit from expert training and consultation to improve their intentions and skills to implement a set of EBPs to help their students' behavioral problems. No risks to participants were expected based on relevant literature in education and implementation science.
02

Conditions studied

  • Child Behavior Disorders
  • Implementation Science
  • Adolescent Problem Behavior at School
  • Healthcare Providers

Keywords

  • Implementation Science
  • School Mental Health Services
  • Healthcare Providers
  • School Teachers
03

In context

Child Behavior Disorders

35 studies on the registry are indexed under Child Behavior Disorders; 10 are open to participants now.

This study's enrollment of 43 is below the median of 134 across 25 interventional studies indexed under Child Behavior Disorders.

Browse Child Behavior Disorders studies →

Lead sponsor

University of Iowa is the lead sponsor of 279 studies on the registry; 33 are open to participants now.

Of its 45 completed or terminated interventional studies of FDA-regulated products, 40 (89%) have results posted.

Counted across the registry records on this site, refreshed daily.

04

Who can participate

Ages eligible
22 Years to 70 Years
Sexes eligible
All
Accepts healthy volunteers
Yes

Go through the criteria one by one — yes, no or not sure — and take the list to your doctor or the study team. Kept in this browser only.

Inclusion criteria

  • Teachers who have no prior training about Proactive Classroom Behavioral Management Strategies (PCBM) targeting youth behaviors in an urban school district.
  • Teachers who have no prior experience in implementing Proactive Classroom Behavioral Management Strategies (PCBM) targeting youth behaviors in an urban school district.

Exclusion criteria

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Teachers who have attended more than three training sessions about Proactive Classroom Behavioral Management Strategies (PCBM) targeting youth behaviors in an urban school district.
  • Teachers who have more than one month of experience in implementing Proactive Classroom Behavioral Management Strategies (PCBM) targeting youth behaviors in an urban school district.
05

Study design

Phase
Not applicable
Primary purpose
Health services research
Allocation
Randomized
Intervention model
Parallel assignment
Masking
Quadruple (Participant, Care provider, Investigator, Outcomes assessor)
Enrollment
43 participants (actual)

Study arms

  • Experimental
    Theory-informed pre-implementation enhancement strategies (SC-PIES)

    The SC-PIES was delivered to teachers as a one-hour professional development session immediately before receiving specific training about evidence-based student behavioral management practices and subsequent follow-up consultation. The content of SC-PIES was grounded in three social-cognitive principles: (a) growth mindset, (b) saying-is-believing, and (c) commitment and consistency.

    Behavioral: Pre-implementation enhancement strategies (SC-PIES)

  • Sham comparator
    Active control

    Participants in the active control condition will meet with school administrators to talk about their work irrelevant to SC-PIES or student behaviors. The meeting lasted for the same duration as the SC-PIES at the same time as those in the treatment condition.

    Other: Sham comparator

Interventions

  • BehavioralPre-implementation enhancement strategies (SC-PIES)

    The SC-PIES was delivered to teachers as a one-hour professional development session immediately before receiving specific training about evidence-based student behavioral management practices and follow-up consultation. SC-PIES content was grounded in three social-cognitive principles: (a) growth mindset, (b) saying-is-believing, and (c) commitment and consistency.

  • OtherSham comparator

    Participants in the active control condition will meet with school administrators to talk about their work irrelevant to SC-PIES or student behaviors. The meeting lasted for the same duration as the SC-PIES at the same time as those in the treatment condition.

06

What researchers measure

Primary outcomes

  1. Change from Baseline Teachers' Intentions to Implement (ITI) at 3 Days

    The Modified Intentions to Use Scale was adopted to assess the change in teachers' intentions to implement from baseline to immediate post-test. The scale is originally developed from research on practitioners' intention to adhere to measurement-based care and is consistent with the recommendations for assessing behavioral intentions based on the theory of planned behavior (Godin \& Kok, 1996). The scale consists of five items on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from "greatly disagree" to "greatly agree". The items were modified to specifically assess teachers' intentions to implement EBPs. The scale showed acceptable reliability and validity in prior research.

    Time frame: Three days following the baseline test of teachers' intentions to implement

  2. Change from Baseline Teachers' Intervention Fidelity at 6 weeks.

    A team of trained professionals, who were blinded to the random assignment results, conducted structured observations to assess the intervention fidelity, which is operationalized in this study as "adherence to core components of the classroom management practices". The data collection took place at pre-test and 6-week follow-up to allow enough time to detect and compare changes in intervention fidelity. First, during core instructional times, trained observers observed two occasions at pre-test and 6-week follow-up to code the presence or absence of the core components of the evidence-based practices. Immediately following the observations, these observers completed a fidelity rating rubric, which was created by operationalizing three core components of each PCBMs such that observers could reliably observe and rate them. The average of the observation coding and the rubric scores represents each teacher's fidelity.

    Time frame: Six weeks following the baseline test of teachers' intervention fidelity

Secondary outcomes

  1. Change from Baseline Students' Academic Engaged Time (AET) at 6 weeks

    AET is defined as "any instance where youths are attending to instruction, watching the teacher or speaker, or concentrating on their classwork". This study will use Direct Behavior Ratings (DBRs) for academic engaged time (AET) with which a teacher observes a youth's AET throughout a predetermined interval. Based on the literature of DBRs, teacher-completed DBRs have strong correlations to Structured Direct Observation in assessing AET (Sanetti, 2009). The DBRs will be completed at pre-test and 6-week follow-up. For comparability across classrooms, each teacher completes DBRs during the reading/language arts block at the same time each day of the week for five randomly selected youths, whose results will be then averaged for that class. This approach has demonstrated adequate reliability and validity to capture class-wide AET in education literature (Sanetti, 2009).

    Time frame: Six weeks following the baseline test of students' AET

07

Study locations

No study locations are listed for this record.

08

References and documents

Publications

  • Godin G, Kok G. The theory of planned behavior: a review of its applications to health-related behaviors. Am J Health Promot. 1996 Nov-Dec;11(2):87-98. doi: 10.4278/0890-1171-11.2.87. PubMed 10163601 ↗
  • Sanetti LM, Kratochwill TR. Toward developing a science of treatment integrity: Introduction to the special series. School Psychology Review. 2009 Dec 1;38(4):445.
  • Zhang Y, Cook CR, Azad GF, Larson M, Merle JL, Thayer J, Pauls A, Lyon AR. A Pre-Implementation Enhancement Strategy to Increase the Yield of Training and Consultation for School-Based Behavioral Preventive Practices: a Triple-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial. Prev Sci. 2023 Apr;24(3):552-566. doi: 10.1007/s11121-022-01464-3. Epub 2022 Nov 11. PubMed 36367633 ↗

Individual participant data

Plan to share: Yes — The de-identified datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework repository, [osf.io/d5t4m/].

Supporting information: Study protocol, Statistical analysis plan, Analytic code

Time frame: From December 1st, 2021 with no ending date

Access criteria: Public upon request to the principle investigator

Data sharing details ↗ · osf.io

09

Updates

Tracking since Sep 25, 2026
No changes since tracking began. The registry record was last updated on Feb 15, 2022, before this site started recording changes on Sep 25, 2026. Its history is on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗
10

Registry details

Key details

Study ID
NCT05240222
Lead sponsor
University of Iowa
Responsible party
Yanchen Zhang (Assistant Professor, University of Iowa) — Principal investigator
First posted
Feb 15, 2022
Start date
Jul 22, 2016
Primary completion
May 20, 2017
Completion
Jul 1, 2017
Last update
Feb 15, 2022

Study contacts

Yanchen Zhang, PhD
principal investigator · University of Iowa

Oversight

Data monitoring committee
No
FDA-regulated drug
No
FDA-regulated device
No
View the source record on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗

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This study is completed, as verified in Feb 2022. You cannot join it, but the record below documents what was studied.

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