ility study is to explore the feasibility of implementing E-PLAYS within the NHS nationally without research team support. Therefore, SLTs will be introduced to the E-PLAYS game and to the manual only. The SLTs will use a training manual with which to train teaching assistants which covers the delivery of E-PLAYS in depth. They will train teaching assistants for around 1 h.
Quantitative outcome measures
In addition to basic demographic data on age, gender and ethnicity, selected quantitative measures have been chosen for sound psychometric properties (validity, reliability, internal consistency, inter-rater reliability). The specific feasibility outcomes to ascertain recruitment, measure treatment fidelity, test acceptability of both the intervention and of the measures used, and test the feasibility of data collection for language and communication measures, social and mental health measures, generalisation and cost effectiveness for an economic evaluation are given below, with details of the instruments, scales, assessments and interviews to be used:
(a) Recruitment measures
A recruitment log will be kept to determine participation, drop-out and completion rates to inform a possible future full-scale trial.
(b) Language and communication outcome measures
(i) The Children’s Communication Checklist-2, (CCC-2, )
The CCC-2 is the most widely used, standardised questionnaire of communication impairment in research and clinical contexts and will be completed by teachers.
(ii) Test of Pragmatic Skills, (TPS, ).
This is an observational elicitation measure. The tester (RA) engages the child in structured play in which test questions are embedded. The TPS was a sensitive indicator and successful at detecting improvements in communication in our pilot study; it has been standardised on 650+ children by the author. It will be administered by blinded RAs.
(iii) Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-5 (CELF-5, ).
We will use one of the subscales; recalling sentences. This sentence repetition assessment is a frequently used measure and is generally regarded as a measure of overall language ability drawing upon a wide range of language processing skills . This will also be administered by blinded RAs.
(c) Social behaviour, friendship and mental health measure
The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire
The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is regarded as the ‘gold standard’ measure and is widely used as a mental health indicator with subscales assessing behavioural, emotional and peer problems. This will be completed by teachers .
(d) Measure of generalisation to social contexts
Dyadic collaborative construction task (Magformers®)
A frequently reported issue with interventions targeting children with SCI is that the skills learned do not generalise to contexts beyond those of the intervention. In order to explore whether communication skills learned through E-PLAYS do in fact generalise to other contexts, children will be video-recorded undertaking a typical classroom collaborative task with a peer. The task we will ask the children to complete involves constructing a Magformers® model following a set of video-recorded instructions; this will take around 10 min. Magformers® are plastic, brightly coloured, magnetised blocks (similar in size to Lego® but different in shape and operation) with which it is possible to construct small models (see magformers.co.uk). All children in intervention and control groups will undertake this task and be recorded; children’s use of different kinds of communication will be observed and coded from the video-recording. The Magformers® construction task will be facilitated and video-recorded by blinded RAs who will also undertake coding of the transcripts from the video-recordings.
(e) Health-economic measures
(i) Bespoke Questionnaire
A bespoke questionnaire designed by the team’s health economist based on previous work in studies with children will measure the child’s health services-use (parent-completed, non-blinded).
For the feasibility study, we will not undertake a full econo