Teaching social/vocational skills to retarded adults with a modified table game: an analysis of generalization.

Six adults with intellectual disability lived in a state facility. Staff wanted them to speak up at work.

The team turned Sorry into a teaching tool. They swapped the cards for work-place questions. Right answers earned tokens. Adults also tracked their own answers.

The study ran a multiple baseline across people. Everyone played the game. Later staff watched them in a fake workshop and in their real jobs.

All six adults learned the social lines during the game.

Skills moved easily to the pretend workshop. In the real job site results were spotty. Some adults kept using the skills, others did not.

Timberlake et al. (1987) used the same idea but traded the board for work simulations. They taught two sample tasks and saw skills spread to six new jobs. Their adults kept the skills when the trainer stepped back. This extends the 1984 finding by showing stronger generalization is possible.

Last et al. (1984) ran a near-copy of the study with autistic teens. Card and ball games plus tokens boosted assertive talk for months. The game-plus-BST recipe works across diagnoses and ages.

Spealman et al. (1978) came first. They used a puzzle to teach clothing choices to women with ID. The 1984 study borrows the tabletop-game idea and moves it from life skills to job skills.

You can turn any game into a social-skills drill. Keep the rules, swap the cards, add tokens. Check two places after training: a practice room and the real workplace. If skills fade on the job, add extra rehearsal there or use more real-task examples like Timberlake et al. (1987) did.