Is outerdirectedness employed in a harmful or beneficial manner by students with and without mental retardation?

Factors affecting the desirability of an outerdirected problem-solving approach were examined in 56 students with mental retardation and 53 MA-matched students without mental retardation in order to determine whether these groups employed outerdirectedness in a useful or detrimental manner. Students without mental retardation were sensitive to characteristics of the criterion task, such as task difficulty and usefulness of the external cue, and used outerdirected approaches in a strategic and beneficial manner. Characteristics of the task did not affect use of outerdirected approaches by students with mental retardation, who relied on all types of external cues, task-relevant as well as incidental and misleading, much more than did students without mental retardation. Yet their greater outerdirectedness was strongly affected by the difficulty of the preceding task. After easy initial tasks, students with mental retardation were no more outerdirected than their counterparts without mental retardation. Implications of the findings for lowering the harmful reliance of students with mental retardation on external cues were discussed.