Teaching Debit Card Skills Using General Case Programming

Independent living skills are extremely important for individuals with developmental disabilities as these skills aide in autonomy, lessen the burden on caregivers, and assist with integration into the community. An important skill that should be targeted is purchasing skills. Teaching purchasing skills can bring individuals into contact with new environments and access to items that would not have been available for them to access independently before learning the skill. Traditional purchasing skills often target teaching money and math skills. However, as technology advances, these skills are not only hard to teach to various individuals but may be outdated. There have been a few studies that targeted teaching purchasing skills to individuals using forms other than cash. This study taught debit card purchasing skills using a multiple baseline across participants design to individuals with developmental disabilities and evaluated the effects of using multiple exemplar training on generalization to novel settings. All three study participants showed improved performance after training by demonstrating 87% or more of the steps accurately in the natural setting during post-training generalization probes to the trained stores (average across the three participants and three stores was 90%). Two out of three participants generalized the skill to a novel store with at least 90% accuracy. The third participant generalized the skill to a novel store with 83% accuracy. Maintenance probes were conducted for two of the three participants and those two participants were able to maintain the skill well above baseline accuracy