Acquisition of Digital Literacy Skills in Learners With Developmental Disabilities.

Wang et al. (2025) taught three teens with intellectual or developmental disabilities to pay with a phone app, order food online, check a bus card, and scan a QR code.

The team used clustered forward chaining (CFC). They taught three or four steps at once, then linked the clusters until each full task was done.

A multiple-baseline across tasks design showed who learned what and when.

Every teen mastered all four digital tasks and kept the skills without extra help.

Parents and teachers said the goals, steps, and results were useful and fair.

Ding et al. (2017) first showed CFC could teach an adult with autism to cook from a recipe. Lanqi et al. took the same cluster idea and moved it from the kitchen to the phone screen.

Lambert et al. (2016) also taught chained sport moves to an adolescent with autism, but they used plain forward chaining after discrete-trial drills. Lanqi’s clustered method cut the total trials by grouping steps, a small upgrade in efficiency.

Matson et al. (2011) compared ways to handle untrained steps during forward chaining. Their “skip the missed step” tactic saved time, and Lanqi’s CFC naturally does this by practicing whole clusters at once.

If you work with middle-school or high-school students who have IDD, try CFC for any tech task that has four or more steps. Run a quick probe after the first cluster; if the learner watches a peer and then does the next cluster alone, you may be seeing observational learning—and you can safely drop some trials.