Development of standards of performance by mentally retarded children

The ability of moderately mentally retarded children to set self-performance standards was investigated. We hypothesized that (a) subjects who received training based on the relational concept of "between" would be able to acquire and retain superior standard-setting performance compared to nontrained control subjects, and (b) those receiving this training would be able to generalize their superior standard-setting performance to a task involving more variable feedback as well as to a conceptually more abstract task. Results indicated that the subjects learned and retained concepts that allowed them to set appropriate or realistic self-performance standards. Further, retarded subjects were able to set appropriate standards when given less restricted feedback than was given during the initial training. On a more abstract picture-matching task, no significant differences were found between the two groups.