Functional Skills Training for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

With the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (originally titled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) and the advent of normalization as a guiding philosophical premise and deinstitutionalization as prevalent public policy in the 1970s, monumental changes in the provision of services to individuals with mental retardation and similar developmental disabilities occurred. Importantly, individuals who might have once been placed in large state operated institutions at birth or shortly thereafter remained living at home and began attending public schools. At school, children with mild mental retardation often were exposed to a simplified version of the regular education curriculum (Heward, 1996). Children with more severe retardation were often exposed to a curriculum that was based on normal child development or a readiness model (Wilcox & Bellamy, 1982).Within the developmental model individuals were taught skills in the order in which they emerged in children without disabilities in the belief that those early skills were prerequisite or necessary for the attainment of skills typically learned by children later. Unfortunately, data collected on the postschool outcomes of individuals with disabilities, including mental retardation and related disabilities, revealed that they were not making transitions to adult life successfully (McDonnell, Wilcox, & Hardman, 1991). There were high rates of unemployment, with those who were employed working less than full time.