Increasing Independence in Individuals with Severe Intellectual Disabilities: Investigating Visual Supports for Decreasing Prompt Dependence

Daily living, community, and vocational skills are important groups of skills to teach individuals with disabilities, which enable them to engage independently in more social and community opportunities. Yet individuals with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities often remain dependent upon others for assistance and supervision in participating in many daily activities. This study investigated the effectiveness of combined visual supports, a visual schedule paired with an index of visual tasks analyses, for increasing independence and decreasing prompt dependence. One high school student with a severe intellectual and developmental disability, transitioning to adult developmental services, was trained, using the combined pictorial prompt package, to complete 14 vocational and daily living skills tasks. Results indicated that the student was able to acquire all of the skills to complete all 14 tasks with minimal supports, including reaching 100% independent levels for nine of the 14 tasks. The results show dramatic increases in independence, and decreases in prompts delivered and levels of prompting required. The present study successfully extended previous studies providing pictorial prompts to promote independent task performance in individuals with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities through a generalization phase where three to seven behaviors were completed sequentially and consistently independently, indicating further effectiveness of the intervention for promoting independence to levels more closely resembling that of the general population