Generalization for Students with Severe Handicaps: Strategies and Solutions.

Generalization for Students with Severe Handicaps: Strategies and Solutions The first stated purpose of this book is to provide educators with a decision rule system for selecting strategies to ensure that their students who have moderate, severe, and profound handicaps will use the skills they have learned in all of their living environments. The second purpose is to present empirical evidence substantiating the importance and effectiveness of the suggested rules and strategies. "Skill generalization" is the appropriate use of a skill by a student who is confronted with varied antecedent conditions, settings, and consequences. "Decision rules" are guides used to select training strategies for use with a given student. Concepts of skill generalization and its facilitation have not been taught to most educators and therapists, who as a consequence use the more common "train and hope" approach (ie, they use no generalization strategies).

The first three chapters provide an extensive review of research on strategies for encouraging skill generalizaton and for using a variety of decision rules to encourage initial skill acquisition. The fourth and fifth chapters present the results of two recent studies that test the effect of the proposed rules for selecting generalization strategies for specific students. The last four chapters, actual training modules, cover writing objectives for generalization, the use of probing skills, strategies to improve skill generalization, and proposed decision rules that would guide selection of strategies for the specific student.

This book includes a much-needed update, for the years 1977 through 1986, to a text by Stokes and Baer, published in 1977, that was a major analysis and review of studies of generalization. This book is therefore an excellent reference for researchers studying the efficacy of therapeutic intervention on patients who have acquired a skill through direct, group, or guided therapy services. Therapists have rarely been involved in such studies. Research also is needed to help determine whether the rules and strategies suggested in this book will in fact increase generalization of skills in patients with various diagnoses, who have been trained by therapists using varied treatment approaches in varied treatment settings.

Therapists who do not have a background in educational theory and the behavioral sciences may find the second and third chapters of the book slow reading. These chapters summarize prior research on generalization of training. The authors of these chapters have written them for special educators and other professionals with similar educational backgrounds.

Therapists who work with patients with mental confusion or retardation of either congenital or traumatic origin are likely to find that the methods suggested in the book's last four chapters can help their patients use their therapy-trained skills more often in family and community settings. Included among those methods are gross and find motor activities and activities-of-daily-living training objectives.

The four basic training modules, written for the professional reader, are concise. Because the editor placed the training modules together at the end of the book and provided easy-to-follow flow charts, busy clinical practitioners can easily follow the proposed guidelines.