Acquisition,Maintenance,and Generalization of Parent-Taught Skills with Two Severely Handicapped Infants

Mothers of two severely handicapped infants (CA 4 and 14 months, respectively) were instructed how to teach their children three tasks. A 60-year-old foster mother of a 4-month-old infant taught her child to track visually, auditorially localize a sound, and roll from prone to supine. A 29-year-old mother of a 14-month-old infant taught her child to reach for an object, bear weight in a puppy-prone position, and bear weight in a sitting position. The procedure used to teach each mother to train these skills, termed the direct instruction model, relied heavily upon task analysis. The results obtained suggest that the mothers did learn to teach quickly and that once they implemented what they had learned, each of their children acquired the desired responses and maintained them over time. Pretraining and post-training probes conducted in a different setting suggest that each child had generalized the acquired responses from home to school. These results are discussed both in terms of their implications for the structure of future parent training efforts as well as for additional research.