Using independence training to teach independent living skills to children and young men with visual impairments.
Hand guidance plus step narration is a proven way to teach daily living skills to learners who are blind and have ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with boys and young men who were blind and had intellectual disability.
They wanted to teach daily living skills like making a bed and pouring juice.
Instead of showing a model, the trainer used gentle hand guidance plus a spoken step list.
A multiple-baseline design tracked three skills for each learner.
Skills were checked again ten months later.
What they found
Every learner mastered each skill after the new teaching package.
The skills stayed strong when staff tested them almost a year later.
The study showed that physical guidance plus narration can replace visual modeling.
How this fits with other research
Sievert et al. (1988) used the same BST steps to teach self-advocacy to adults with ID.
Their work came first and proved BST works for this population, but it used sighted learners and different skills.
Stannis et al. (2019) and Peterson et al. (2021) later added in-situ training when BST alone was not enough.
Those later studies kept the core BST pieces from Taras et al. (1993) but added real-world rehearsal for safety skills.
Together the papers form a timeline: basic BST works; if it fails, add practice in the real place.
Why it matters
If you teach learners who cannot see, drop the video model and use hand-over-hand guidance plus short spoken steps.
Follow the same instruction, rehearsal, feedback loop you already know from BST.
Check maintenance every few months; skills can stick for almost a year without extra work.
When a learner struggles, remember later studies added in-situ training—go to the real kitchen or bus stop and practice there.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two groups of students with visual impairments were taught various independent living skills. Of the 7 students, 5 also had a diagnosis of mental retardation. One group (3 first graders) was taught the tasks of folding a shirt, making an emergency telephone call, and spreading soft foods with a knife. The other group (4 young men) was taught to increase leisure skills through three different leather-work tasks. Independence training was conducted in a group format and included social learning components (e.g., self-evaluation, peer evaluation and reinforcement) in addition to traditional operant procedures (e.g., modeling, prompting). However, because of the presence of visual impairments, a physical and verbal modification of modeling was used, whereby the subject was physically guided through the steps and simultaneously provided with a narration of the steps. A multiple baseline design across behaviors demonstrated the efficacy of the comprehensive training package in training various independent living skills to the two groups of visually impaired and mentally retarded students. Social validity measures demonstrated the clinical significance of the subsequent changes in behavioral skills. Follow-up data collected 10 months after the completion of training indicated a good degree of maintenance. The current positive results show that training procedures used exclusively with persons with mental retardation can be modified and be effective with a different and younger population, while targeting different independent living skills.
Behavior modification, 1993 · doi:10.1177/01454455930172006