Teaching young adults with developmental disabilities and visual impairments to use tape-recorded recipes: Acquisition,generalization, and maintenance of cooking skills

Three young adults with developmental disabilities and visual impairments were taught to prepare three different recipes using tape-recorded instructions. Following instruction on each trained recipe, generality probes to untrained recipes were conducted. A multiple baseline across behaviors (recipes) design was used to determine the extent to which each student's preparation of untrained recipes improved as a function of being trained to prepare related recipes by using a self-operated audio prompting system. Results showed that students' cooking skills acquired through instruction on the trained recipes generalized (a) to untrained recipes requiring similar skills (simple generality) and (b) to more complex untrained recipes requiring a combination of skills learned during the instruction of two trained recipes (complex generality).