Teaching Laundry Skills to High School Students with Disabilities: Generalization of Targeted Skills and Nontargeted Information

Abstract

The investigators designed this investigation to teach laundry skills (i.e., washing and drying clothing) to 4 high school students with moderate mental disabilities. Instructional sessions consisted of a system of least prompt procedure with multiple exemplars of materials to facilitate generalization of these skills across community settings. The procedure also included multiple exemplars of nontargeted information (i.e., functional laundry sight words) presented as instructive feedback presented during trials. A multiple probe across students design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Results indicate that the students acquired and generalized the target skills and that they also acquired and generalized much of the nontargeted information.