Virtually Delicious: Making Grilled Cheese and Life Skills Stick

Technology-based interventions offer educators a safe, effective, and low-cost option to teach life skills, such as food preparation, to students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). However, researchers need to explore beyond acquisition and maintenance for technology-based interventions and also assess generalization in real life settings. In this single-case design multiple probe across participants study, researchers taught five middle school students with moderate intellectual disability to cook a grilled cheese sandwich on a stove in a non-immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. The researchers also assessed for students completing the task in real life on a hot plate in their classroom. The students acquired the food preparation skills within the non-immersive VR and improved their ability to make a grilled cheese sandwich in real life. However, generalization was limited and calls into question non-immersive VR for real-world skills demonstration.