Teaching Mentally Retarded Adults to Cook

Acquisition of cooking skills is important for the adaptation of developmentally disabled clients to community living. The social and content validity of procedures to teach broiling, baking, and boiling was established using the opinions and recommendations of people from the community and home economists as criteria. Four mentally retarded adults were taught to cook various food items using pictorial recipes, a sequence of prompts, and a package of positive consequences. A multiple baseline across subjects demonstrated experimental control, and a multiple baseline across responses was employed to examine generalization across cooking responses. The results showed relatively rapid acquisition of the three cooking skills, substantial maintenance of the newly learned responses, and idiosyncratic patterns of generalization within and between the cooking methods. Sorne evidence of generalization from the training setting to the participants' home was found. The procedures also were cost effective.