Acquisition Performance by Mentally Retarded Children and Young Adults on a Complex Benchwork Task

Abstract

Intervention literature concerned with handicapped children has demonstrated that early and systematic exposure to instruction promotes language development, improves motor performance, facilitates social interaction, and improves academic skills. By analogy, if critical job-related behaviors could be taught earlier to handicapped children, later work behaviors might be taught with more ease and work performance improved. To assess the capacity of younger handicapped children to learn a benchwork assembly, a common workshop requirement, 18 children (mean age 12.7) were taught a complex worksample, and various acquisition measures were compared with the performance of 60 older subjects (mean age 21.6) on the same task. Only one significant difference was found between all measures of acquisition. These results suggest that younger subjects are able to learn complex work tasks much earlier than is evidenced by current prevocational practice.