Effects of a home-based intervention conducted by college students for young children with intellectual delays in Vietnam

The purpose of the project was to assess the efficacy of a home-based intervention program for young children (n= 64, ages ranging from 3-6 years) with developmental delays in Vietnam.  Assessment of the program efficacy was carried out by comparing children who received services for 6 months and those who did not.  It was hypothesized that the children in the intervention would show greater progress in adaptive behavior than the children in the control group.  Participants were children recognized as having developmental delays by teachers in kindergarten programs, confirmed as developmentally delayed by trained evaluators based on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale-II (VABS-II), then randomly assigned to intervention and control groups.  Twenty student teachers who were studying psychology and education were recruited from a teaching university in Hanoi and were provided with pre-program training and ongoing supervision by special education specialists.  The outcomes of the program were examined at 0, 3, and 6 months using the VABS-II.  The intervention group improved significantly more than the control group in overall adaptive functioning (F = 5.0, p <.01) and in the areas of communication (F = 2.8, p < .05), social skills (F = 2.7, p < .05) and motor skills (F=7.6, p. <.001).  The results demonstrate the feasibility of carrying out the intervention program using teachers with no prior experience of working with children with delays/disabilities, which can be important in countries such as Vietnam, where professional resources are scarce for working with this special population.