A comparison of forward and concurrent chaining strategies in teaching laundromat skills to students with severe handicaps.

Four high-school students with severe intellectual disability learned to do laundry. The teacher compared two ways to teach the steps: forward chaining and concurrent chaining.

In forward chaining, the student learns step one first, then steps one and two, and so on. In concurrent chaining, the student practices the whole task every time, but the teacher gives extra help on the hard parts.

The study used an alternating-treatments design. Each student tried both methods on different days until they could do all steps alone.

Concurrent chaining won. Students learned the full laundry routine faster and kept the skill after four and eight weeks.

With forward chaining, some steps were forgotten because they were taught early and practiced less later.

Meuret et al. (2001) worked with mild and moderate ID students and showed that extra practice in a pretend laundry room helps, but only if the students do not get strong real-world training later. Lincoln et al. (1988) extends this by showing that for severe ID, concurrent chaining in the real laundromat works best from the start.

Conyers et al. (2004) also used an alternating-treatments design in a classroom. Both studies prove the design is quick for comparing two teaching tactics in school settings.

Park et al. (2020) reviewed maintenance studies in ID and found that prompting plus visual cues keeps skills. The 1988 study lines up: concurrent chaining kept laundry skills because the teacher kept prompts in place across every step.

If you teach multi-step living skills like laundry, dish washing, or food prep, skip the old forward-chain method. Run the whole task each session and add prompts only where needed. You will save weeks of training time and see stronger maintenance during monthly probes.