Pivotal Response Treatment

The National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorder (NPDC on ASD) initially reviewed the research literature on evidence-based, focused intervention practices in 2008. A second, more comprehensive review was completed by NPDC in 2013.

• A total of 27 EBPs are identified in the current review.
• Of the 27 practices, 10 practices that met criteria had participants in the infant and toddler age group, thus showing effectiveness of the practice with infants and toddlers with ASD.

The practices were identified as evidence-based when at least two high quality group design studies, five single case design, or a combination of one group design and three single case designed studies showed that the practice was effective. The full report is available on the NPDC on ASD website.

PRT meets evidence-based criteria with 1 group design and 7 single-case design studies. For the infant and toddler age group,one group design study included toddlers with autism and demonstrated positive outcomes in training parents in the use of PRT (Nefdt, et al., 2010). PRT can be used effectively to address soail, communication, joinrt attention, and play skills. A complete list of the research evidence-base literature for children aged birth to five is included in the Module Resources section.

Studies have been conducted for individual components of PRT, for the entire multi-component intervention, in multiple contexts, and for multiple ages and target behaviors. However, it is important to note that the development of this infant/toddler module extrapolated from PRT studies on slightly older children, as well as clinical expertise and very recent data on PRT for infants and toddlers. See References for a list of relevant studies, chapters, books, and websites.

Refer to the PRT Fact Sheet from the updated EBP report for further information on the literature for prompting procedures.