The proposed research investigates automated, programming techniques for the objective evaluation and education, including socialization, of severely retraded children and young adults. The procedures permit full control over stimulus and reinforcing events, including social variables, and constitute a comprehensive intervention in the lives of retarded individuals whose peculiar behavior problems make them difficult or impossible to teach by more traditional methods. The research will investigate the educational setting and conditions sufficient, and perhaps necessary, to achieve unambiguous and continuous stimulus control of the subjects' learning. The setting is a highly specialized teaching room for the individual subject where the interactions between the subject and the teaching conditions are intensively examined and modified constructively. Specific research objectives, refined from program development, focus on the analysis of environmental and behavioral prerequistes for the acquisition of new receptive and expressive skills in this largely nonverbal population. Matching-to-sample studies address control over the children's behavior by spoken works, a primary step in communication and social training. Alternative procedures that employ ASL signs are proposed for nonvocal subjects. Investigations of the development of orderly interactions with teachers, conducted first using interactive television, receive emphasis. These studies seek to obtain forms of instructional control that will be adaptable for implementation in the subjects' home environment and traditional educational settings, and that will prepare severely reteraded idividuals for effective participation in these settings.
