Training pre-adolescent and adolescent students with moderate mental retardation name writing skills

The purpose of the present investigation was to determine whether school children with moderate retardation could learn to print their own first names with a systematic set of behavioral teaching procedures. Teaching procedures involved the use of task analysis, prompting, modeling, and contingent teacher praise. Teaching procedures were evaluated in a combination multiple baseline and pre-post-test design with repeated measures across subject-pairs. Results indicated that the children acquired the skills to print their names legibly during the 6-week training program. Follow-up data, taken at 10 and 15 days after the experiment was terminated revealed that the subjects retained the writing skills that were previously trained.