Assessing and teaching job-related social skills to adults with neurodevelopmental disorders in Italy

Radogna and her team in Italy worked with three adults who have neurodevelopmental disorders.

The adults wanted to learn job-related social skills like greeting coworkers and asking for help.

The trainers used Behavioral Skills Training plus a token system. Adults earned tokens for good practice and traded them for small prizes.

Sessions happened in a community room. Later, the team watched the adults try the same skills at real job sites.

All three adults learned the new social skills quickly.

They still used the skills weeks later and used them with new coworkers they had never met.

Supervisors and family members said the changes were useful and looked natural.

Pierce et al. (1994) did something very similar thirty years earlier. They used BST without tokens to teach U.S. adults with developmental disabilities how to answer job-interview questions. Both studies got good generalization, showing the core BST recipe keeps working.

Callahan et al. (2022) also used BST with adults with NDD, but taught Zoom skills in group video calls. Skills went up, just like in the Italian study. Together, the three papers show BST works for different social goals, in person or online.

Kirkpatrick et al. (2021) paired BST with a token economy too, but they trained college students to run the tokens, not to learn social skills. The shared piece is the token add-on: when you reinforce practice, learning speeds up.

If you coach adults with autism or other NDD for community jobs, this gives you a ready-made plan. Run brief BST cycles, add a simple token board, then probe performance on the actual worksite. You do not need fancy equipment or long programs. The token piece is cheap—stickers, snacks, or extra break minutes work fine. Start with one social skill, collect data, and expand once you see the trend.