Teaching janitorial skills to autistic adolescents

In the Special Education Clinic at the University of Texas at El Paso, a study was conducted to teach janitorial skills to retarded adolescents with autism. The study was designed to examine the efficacy of using three levels of prompts on three autistic clients' acquisition of 18 response sequences in cleaning a restroom. The restroom cleaning behavior was task analyzed prior to the implementation of the ten training sessions which were conducted once a week for one hour. The results indicated that, as compared to the pretraining competencies, the training was effective in teaching restroom cleaning skills. However, without prompts the skills acquired remained at about a 70% proficiency rate, which appeared to be a plateau under the training situation. Clients were also able to generalize without prompts approximately 83% of the acquired (or 52% of the total) sequences to new and similar restrooms. The study demonstrates that, to a certain degree, autistic adolescents with mental retardation can learn and transfer restroom cleaning skills. More research is needed on ways to increase the fluency of their responses, decrease reliance on physical prompts, and to improve generalization to other vocational settings.