The diagnostic categories of severe and profound mental retardation are presently blurred and used in idiosyncratic ways by both researchers and practitioners. A review of the literature shows that severely and profoundly mentally retarded persons actually have distinctively different characteristics that may form functional subcategories of individual differences related to programs of education and training. The searches for these functional subcategories are just in their preliminary stages but without these searches, programs of education, training, and research with severely and profoundly mentally retarded persons will remain inefficient trial-and-error enterprises that are unreplicable.
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