This application seeks support for an SBIR Phase I project to develop and study a computer-based product intended primarily for teaching children with mental retardation, autism, and other intellectual disabilities. The product addresses essential skills critical to completing tasks that involve a sequence of steps. The objective is to teach students to """"""""read"""""""" pictures (instead of words), either in trained or novel combinations, in order to complete tasks independently. In other words, in the Picture Reader program, the pictures will serve as instructional stimuli. The components of the curriculum require the student to watch and imitate a video model of a task and to reproduce the behavior sequence when presented with pictures corresponding to the steps of the video task. The project has two major objectives. First, we will adapt sequence-teaching methods and software to develop a product that will facilitate the teaching of task-sequence reproduction skills. Second, we will evaluate the product to determine that it can be used effectively in typical educational and home or community situations. There is a clear need for the product. Many children with intellectual disabilities fail to learn to complete multi-step (i.e., sequenced) tasks independently and without a great deal of teacher or parent support. Others acquire these skills only with great difficulty. However, research supported by NIH has resulted in development of techniques that can establish aspects of generalized performances that foster independent task completion. Unfortunately, parents and professionals do not have available to them instructional programs for teaching sequencing skills for task completion. This proposal aims to fill that gap and is particularly relevant to the development of computer-assisted instruction that establishes generative life skill performance.
The Specific Aims of the project are to: (1) adapt sequence training procedures developed in the laboratory for use in an effective, user-friendly computer-managed instructional environment; (2) develop a prototype to support the curriculum; (3) determine that the prototype can be used to teach students from the target population to a) imitate video task sequences; b) identify still pictures that match segments of the video; and c) use pictures reflecting video steps to facilitate task completion in a variety of contexts (i.e., generalization).
