Teaching Self-Help Skills to the Mentally Retarded

Abstract

The behavior modification (operant) approach to teaching independent living skills is a relatively new technology that has been in existence for approximately fifteen years. Antecedents to this technique can be found in the writings of Skinner (1953, 1958), Ellis (1974), Bijou (1966), Bijou and Orlando (1961), and Ferster (1961). Skinner (1953) speculated about ways the operant conditioning method could be used to develop social/educational systems. Shortly thereafter he published a paper on programmed instruction in which operant conditioning procedures were shown to have utility for teaching certain “cognitive” skills (Skinner, 1958). The implication of this paper was that the operant conditioning approach to programmed instruction could be used to train complex cognitive skills that might not be learned by more conventional educational methods. In 1958, Ellis presented a paper entitled “Behavioral Engineering in Development of Self-Help Skills” at the Southeastern American Association on Mental Deficiency Convention. At this presentation, he described a procedure for teaching toileting, dressing, and feeding skills to severely retarded persons living in residential institutions (Ellis, 1974). Shortly thereafter, Bijou and Orlando (1961) published a paper showing that mentally retarded persons were controlled behaviorally by schedules of reinforcement. Bijou (1966) later published a treatise on how the physical, biological, and social environments contribute to the condition known as mental retardation. It was a rather simple matter to conclude that if mental retardation could be caused, in part, by a person’s psychological environment, then special psychoeducational techniques could reverse the condition, to some extent. Ferster (1961) put forth a similar argument about autistic children. He conducted studies showing that token reinforcement could serve as an incentive with autistic children, and that these children were responsive to the operant conditioning method. Thus, the conceptual framework for the development of behavior modification techniques for teaching independent living skills was laid.