Comparing Mobile Technologies for Teaching Vocational Skills to Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders and/or Intellectual Disabilities Using Universally-Designed Prompting Systems.

Van Laarhoven et al. (2018) asked four teens with autism and intellectual disability to try two tablets at school.

One tablet was an iPad. The other was an HP Slate. Both showed picture, text, and audio prompts for packing and sorting jobs.

The teens picked which tablet they liked and tapped the screen to fade the prompts themselves. The team counted how many job steps each teen finished alone.

Three of the four teens jumped from needing help on most steps to doing almost every step alone.

The teens quickly chose to tap away prompts as they got better. Both tablets worked equally well.

Diemer et al. (2023) later showed young adults kept new work skills for three months after learning with video prompts. Toni’s study adds that teens can run the fading themselves and still win fast gains.

Bigby et al. (2009) and Spanoudis et al. (2011) used older PDAs that faded prompts automatically. Toni lets the learner decide when to fade, giving teens more control and matching their pace.

Cruz-Torres et al. (2020) swapped student control for parent delivery and moved from vocational jobs to daily-living skills like brushing teeth. Both studies show iPads boost independence; the agent and task can change without losing power.

You can hand a tablet to a teen with ASD or ID and let them choose the device and the fading speed. Expect quick, large jumps in independent work right away. No extra staff time is needed once the prompts are loaded. Try this in classroom work sites or job training rooms next week.