Evaluation of tactile prompts with a student who is deaf, blind, and mentally retarded

We provided tactile cues to a student who was deaf, blind, and mentally retarded to guide her performance on a variety of packaging tasks. The student had previously received extensive training on multiple packaging and sequencing tasks through her vocational education program. Although she was able to complete these tasks, each change in materials necessitated that similar levels of retraining be conducted in order for her to perform revised tasks. Tactile cues were introduced and evaluated through a multiple baseline with sequential withdrawal design for two envelope-stuffing tasks and one bagging task. Results indicated that the tactile prompts were effective in guiding her performance on the training task and in promoting generalization to novel tasks and cues. Continued use of the cues was necessary to maintain the student's performance. Our findings suggest that tactile prompts function similarly to picture prompts and may be an effective alternative external prompting system for persons for whom picture prompts would not be appropriate.