Effects of Peer-Delivered Self-Instructional Training on a Lunch-Making Work Task for Students with Severe Disabilities

Abstract

We investigated the effects of peer-delivered self-instructional training on the work performance of three students with moderate to severe disabilities. Two students with mild mental retardation were trained to teach the participants two task-specific self-instructions and an interactive statement to a customer while they prepared sack lunches. Results indicated that two of the three participants learned to make sack lunches in the correct sequence and generalized their responding across novel customers. For the third participant, increases in performance with generalized responding across novel customers occurred only after picture cues were added to a self-instructional training package directed by a non-peer trainer. Conditional probabilities were calculated to determine the correspondence between the self-instructions and the task responses. The implications of the results for employment training are discussed.