A study compared a 4 s constant time delay and a simultaneous prompting procedure on teaching receptively identifying animals to three children (ages 7-10) with mild/moderate mental retardation. Both procedures were effectively implemented by sibling tutors, simultaneous prompting was more efficient, and constant time delay resulted in more…

Study demonstrates a method for integrating in-class and out-of-class procedures to assess and treat an adaptive behavior deficit. Assessment and teaching procedures were implemented outside the classroom in a multiple baseline design across students, followed by generalization programming in the classroom. All students generalized correct…

A study involving three preschoolers with developmental disabilities examined whether or not the use of a simultaneous prompting procedure would result in an increase on the percentage of correct responding of receptively identifying occupations from picture cards. Results found simultaneous prompting was effective. Maintenance and generalization…

Three adolescent boys with autism were taught to offer assistance to a person stating inability to complete a task. Generalization of skills in a variety of settings varied across youths, although all three boys showed some transfer of skills to all conditions. (Author/DB)

Effects of self-monitoring on generalization and maintenance of conversational skills (asking directed and nondirected questions and answering directed questions) of two mentally retarded women was examined. Following addition of self-monitoring to training programs, skills were maintained for six months including the untrained behavior of…

Reviews several assumptions commonly made about the grieving process: that depression is inevitable; that distress is necessary and failure to experience it indicates pathology; that it is necessary to "work through" a loss; and that recovery and resolution are to be expected following loss. Notes that available empirical work fails to support and…

Four autistic children, age 8-15, exhibited fewer correct responses to a stimulus as the number of stimulus components was increased from 1 to 4. Training was effective in producing some generalized increases in responses to complex stimuli. (Author/JDD)

The study evaluated two simulation methods (either on-self or using a doll) of general case instruction in teaching menstrual care to four severely/profoundly retarded adolescents and women. Results indicated limited generalization after training using a doll, high levels of generalized responding following on-self instruction, but decreased…

Four preschool children with autism played "Follow-the-Leader," in which a normal peer demonstrated and physically prompted a variety of actions and object manipulations that defined the activity. Following training, all four subjects generalized their imitative skill to a new setting involving new actions and object manipulations. (Author/JDD)

A perceptual fading technique was used to teach unilingual adult Canadian francophones to identify the voiceless and voiced linguadental fricatives of English. After just 90 minutes of training, subjects were better able to identify both the training stimuli and an untrained set of natural consonant-vowel exemplars produced by 4 different…

A review of 25 studies found that demonstrations of successful generalization of skills by persons with profound mental handicaps were characterized by: several trained exemplars, trained behaviors likely to be reinforced in natural settings by natural consequences, use of training stimuli common to the generalization setting, and training in…

The effects of expressive modeling experiences on the observational learning of generative language by children with severe mental retardation was investigated. All six children (aged six-nine) demonstrated observational learning of responses modeled by their peers. Organizing the modeling experiences according to matrix-training principles…

Three autistic boys, aged 6-7, observed videotaped conversations consisting of 2 people discussing toys. Subsequent assessment of the boys using untrained topics of conversation, new stimuli, new persons, and other settings indicated that the children learned through video modeling, generalized their conversational skills, and maintained…

The article describes a two-year learning strategies program for ninth and tenth grade learning-disabled students which involves four tutorial periods and four learning strategy classes per week, and team teaching of strategy development in mainstream classes. The program has fostered independence and generalization of learned strategies to…

Considers two ways of conducting the search for generalizations about messages: (1) single-message research designs used with meta-analytic summaries; and (2) multiple-message designs treating messages as a random factor in the statistical analysis. Contends that the treatment of messages as a random factor is statistically appropriate. (MS)