Evidence-Based Practice for Teaching Academics to Students with Severe Developmental Disabilities

A review of the literature was conducted for articles published between 2003 and 2010 to build a case for the degree to which evidence-based practices were documented for teaching academic skills to students with severe developmental disabilities. This review extended earlier comprehensive work in literacy, mathematics, and science for the population in question. A total of 18 studies met the Horner et al. (2005) quality indicator criteria. In general, time delay and task analytic instruction were found to be evidence-based practices. In addition, specific target responses were defined to show academic learning, with the most prevalent target responses being discrete responses; the type of systematic prompting and feedback used most often was time delay, while the component used least often was stimulus fading/shaping; and teaching formats used most often were massed trials and one-to-one instruction. (Contains 2 tables.)