Guidelines for Facilitating Direct Instruction of Generalized Social Behavior: Teaching the General Case

Social deficits are a common feature in individuals with low incidence disabilities. Current solutions used to teach social skills are not always effective, especially when it comes to generalizing these skills to novel contexts. General case programming (GCP) is an instructional methodology founded on the science-based tenets of Direct Instruction, designed to clearly communicate the multiple contexts and response variations a learner is likely to encounter in their complex social environments. The purpose of this article is to describe how GCP can be utilized to help program for generalization of social skills.