Self instruction and external instructional methods were compared with 19 mentally retarded adults. Results indicated that participants receiving verbal self-instructional training in the complex sequencing task achieved and sustained a higher level of performance than participants receiving external instruction. (Author/DB)

Twenty individuals with mild retardation and 20 individuals with moderate retardation participated in simulated instruction and/or community training of four functional living tasks. Participants with mild retardation performed better on simulated tasks and in the community settings, however, in many situations, community training was sufficiently…

This review of 20 years of literature on sight word instruction for individuals with handicaps examines effectiveness data for procedures teaching word recognition and comprehension. Covered are "errorless procedures," prompt elimination, stimulus fading, time delay, easy to hard discrimination, and trial and error with feedback. Two tables…

Four autistic and severely handicapped children (ages 9-13) were taught to recruit or set the occasion for praise from an adult. After the structured instruction, the children used these behaviors in all generalization settings and were frequently successful in recruiting praise. (Author/DB)

Results of withdrawing instructional components and trainers after a previous study using picture recipe cards to teach three mentally retarded adults to prepare meals indicated (from self reports and roommate reports) maintenance of trained skills during a 10-month period. (Author/DB)

The study assessed a program involving distinctive-feature prompts for teaching four educable mentally retarded children (ages 7-9) to use appropriate arithmetical operations with multicomponent pictorial problems. Results indicated the program was effective with all subjects. (Author/DB)

Four trainers taught communicative gestures to four individuals with severe mental retardation during one-to-one sessions. Preceding each training session, verbal feedback was given with regard to the trainer's performance during the previous session. Delayed feedback was found to result in increased accuracy of training. (Author/JDD)

This study examined whether sentence-combining exercises (with reinforcement) would increase the number of descriptive adjectives used in daily writing samples by three adolescents with autism. The sentence-combining exercises increased the number of adjectives used in the students' writing samples, and this increase was maintained in the absence…

Two studies compared the effectiveness of two procedures (multiple examples across trials and within trials) in teaching 10 students (ages 10-20) with moderate disabilities functional word discriminations. The first procedure was superior in acquisition; the latter procedure, however, was better under generalization for most participants.…

A study examined the use of a phonological awareness intervention program with three children with Down syndrome (ages 7-8). The intervention focused on key skills of alliteration detection, phoneme isolation, spelling of orthographically regular words, and rhyme detection. Results indicate participants improved the phonological awareness skills…

The study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of concurrent and isolation-intermix instruction in teaching four preschool children to read common words in their environment. Concurrent instruction resulted in students learning conditional discriminations in fewer trials and minutes of instructional time suggesting the value of teaching…

A teaching approach which used general case procedures for selecting teaching examples was effective in teaching four severely retarded high school students basic telephone skills. Trained skills generalized to nontrained telephone situations and telephone use was continued (at 18 months after training) as a part of each student's lifestyle.…

Evaluation of two methods, Stimulus Manipulation and Delay Feedback Only, for teaching four mildly handicapped students (ages 9-13) to solve missing minuend problems found both methods to be effective. However, systematic differences in error rate and long-term retention were observed, favoring the Stimulus Manipulation procedure. (Author/DB)

The paper reviews 26 studies using the delayed prompt procedure in applied and laboratory settings with developmentally disabled children and adults and others. Results suggest that the delayed prompt procedure is an efficient teaching strategy, with subjects typically acquiring discriminations within a few training sessions or limited number of…

Evaluation of a program which taught six severely mentally retarded individuals (ages 8-25) to sign interactively with each other found participants showed increased signing skills in a training play situation, generalized use of these skills in a second play situation, and maintained the trained skills over a 2 to 4 month period. (Author/DB)