The effectiveness of three sets of school-based instructional materials and community training on the acquisition and generalization of community laundry skills by students with severe handicaps.
Real machines beat pictures and cardboard every time—two community trips are enough for kids to generalize laundry skills to any laundromat.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with six high-school students who had severe intellectual disability.
Each student got three kinds of laundry lessons: picture cards, a tabletop washer made of cardboard, or trips to a real laundromat.
Teachers recorded how many steps each kid got right during lessons and later at a new laundromat they had never visited.
What they found
All kids learned fastest when they practiced with real machines instead of pictures or cardboard.
After only two community trips every student could do a full wash cycle in a brand-new laundromat with no help.
Kids who saw only pictures or cardboard needed extra lessons before they could wash clothes anywhere else.
How this fits with other research
Miller et al. (2020) later showed the same pattern with airport trips: five autistic preschoolers mastered real air travel after three short VR practices.
Smits-Engelsman et al. (2023) looked like they disagreed when kids with coordination disorder kept video-game balance skills but failed to use them on real playground beams.
The difference is task type: laundry and airport steps stay the same on screen and in life, while playground beams feel very different from a game mat, so the studies actually line up.
Chezan et al. (2019) reviewed 21 motor-skill papers and found the same rule: practice must match the real world if you want the skill to travel there.
Why it matters
If you want laundry, shopping, or bus-riding skills to stick, skip the miniatures and worksheets.
Take students to the actual location early and often.
Two or three real-site visits can replace weeks of classroom drills and give you faster generalization for free.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examined the effectiveness of three sets of school-based instructional materials and community training on acquisition and generalization of a community laundry skill by nine students with severe handicaps. School-based instruction involved artificial materials (pictures), simulated materials (cardboard replica of a community washing machine), and natural materials (modified home model washing machine). Generalization assessments were conducted at two different community laundromats, on two machines represented fully by the school-based instructional materials and two machines not represented fully by these materials. After three phases of school-based instruction, the students were provided ten community training trials in one laundromat setting and a final assessment was conducted in both the trained and untrained community settings. A multiple probe design across students was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the three types of school instruction and community training. After systematic training, most of the students increased their laundry performance with all three sets of school-based materials; however, generalization of these acquired skills was limited in the two community settings. Direct training in one of the community settings resulted in more efficient acquisition of the laundry skills and enhanced generalization to the untrained laundromat setting for most of the students. Results of this study are discussed in regard to the issue of school versus community-based instruction and recommendations are made for future research in this area.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1987 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(87)90043-6