Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities

A 12 month education project was planned for 27 institutionalized, severely retarded children. The results of employing a skill center curriculum, in combination with behavior modification techniques, indicated significant progress in the areas of motor skills, vocabulary, communication, and social behavior.

The following article offers as a premise the need for innovation in special education at a time when the pace of social and educational change has increased. Suggestions offered include use of epidemiologic as well as psychometric models of retardation, and the value of basic studies of the ecology of early mental growth. Original data are presented on retarded mental development, and two conceptual schemas are offered, the first for the integration of research, service, and planning, the second for the development of instructional significance in developmental data.

A representative sample of educable mentally retarded males and females in public secondary day schools and state residential institutions participated in standardizing the Reading-Free Vocational Interest Inventory, a recently devised nonreading method to measure vocational likes and dislikes. Separate norms tables were prepared for males and females to convert raw scores on each interest scale to standard scores and equivalent percentile ranks. Test-retest reliability on subsamples were highly satisfactory. Validity coefficients obtained with concurrent testing were encouraging with many values significant at high levels of confidence. Predictive validity is yet to be established as well as needed research with populations other than the mentally retarded.