Providing a more appropriate education for severely handicapped persons: increasing and validating functional classroom tasks.
A short teacher class followed by supervisor feedback locks in functional tasks that last the whole school year for students with severe disabilities.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers gave teachers a short in-service on functional tasks for students with severe disabilities.
After the training, supervisors visited classrooms and gave prompts plus feedback.
They tracked whether students did real-world tasks like sorting mail or setting tables for almost a full school year.
What they found
Student engagement in useful tasks shot up and stayed high for 44–45 weeks.
Gains held even after supervisors cut back to monthly visits.
The package worked in every classroom that tried it.
How this fits with other research
Bickel et al. (1984) ran the same plan in a residential home one year earlier and got the same lasting gains.
Ivancic et al. (1981) and Striefel et al. (1974) showed earlier that feedback alone can shift staff behavior, but H et al. added the brief class first.
van Vonderen et al. (2010) later swapped plain feedback for video feedback and saw even faster staff improvement, so the model keeps evolving.
Shabani et al. (2006) later used the same supervision package to fix data accuracy instead of student tasks, proving the frame stretches to new goals.
Why it matters
You can copy this trio: 1) quick in-service, 2) supervisor prompts, 3) feedback. It costs little and keeps kids working on jobs that matter all year. Try it next term for any adaptive skill you want to stick.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We evaluated a teacher training and supervision program for increasing the involvement of severely handicapped adolescents and adults in functional educational tasks. The program, consisting of a brief in-service followed by supervisory prompts and feedback, was accompanied by large increases in functional tasks in three classrooms. In addition, generalized increases occurred during nontargeted times in the classroom and the changes during both the targeted and nontargeted times were maintained over a 44-45 week period. In two subsequent experiments, surveys provided social validation for the criteria for functional versus nonfunctional tasks in that: (a) relevant individuals reliably categorized functional tasks as representing typical living, work, social, and leisure situations and (b) experienced clinicians consistently rated tasks previously categorized as functional as being more useful for severely handicapped persons than tasks categorized as nonfunctional. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship of functional classroom tasks in the overall provision of appropriate educational services for severely handicapped students.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1985 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1985.18-289