Teaching adults with severe and profound retardation to exit their homes upon hearing the fire alarm

Prompting, modeling, and differential reinforcement with client-chosen rewards were used to teach 3 nonverbal people with severe to profound mental retardation to exit their group homes at the sound of the house fire alarm, using a multiple baseline design. All 3 participants learned to exit independently in less than 2 min in all experimenter-initiated surprise fire drills and in the majority of staff-initiated surprise fire drills. Each participant was also able to exit from five areas of the house from which teaching was not done.