Self-management with picture prompts to improve quality of household cleaning by severely mentally handicapped persons.
A strategy was devised for measuring quality of household cleaning by four severely mentally handicapped adults living in a community residence. Two interventions were then compared for improving quality of cleaning. One intervention was a staff-managed graduated prompting system. The other intervention was a self-management package (SMP) made up of sequential picture cues, self-monitoring, feedback on performance after task completion, and public posting of results. Although the prompting system produced moderate improvements in three of the subjects (mean increase of 10%), the SMP was much more effective, producing large gains in three of four subjects (mean increase of 32% over prompting and 42% over baseline), resulting in acceptable levels of performance. Generalization to a no-treatment control task was quite limited. Follow-up indicated maintenance of improved performance over a 12-week interval with three of the four subjects.