Scoping review: Interventions that promote functional performance for adolescents and adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Introduction: Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) experience broad impairments that affect their functional performance and consequently result in the need for supervision and assistance on a daily basis. The literature contains effectiveness studies of functional interventions provided to adolescents and adults with IDD. However, existing differences in participant characteristics, study design, and type of functional intervention limit the ability to derive clinical evidence-based decisions. This scoping review sought to explore the breadth and depth of evidence related to interventions designed to promote everyday performance of adolescents and adults with IDD. Methods: We conducted an electronic and hand search that yielded 1568 papers, after an extensive selection process reduced to a sample of 24 studies. Results: A three-step extraction process of the 24 studies revealed 16 studies used functional training and technology-based approaches to teach individuals with IDD functional skills. Seven studies used functional training without a technology component, and two studies used functional training while comparing technology-based to non-technology based approaches. Overall, it appeared that functional training with the use of technology, especially Video Modelling (VM) and Prompting, were the most frequently and effectively used interventions to promote everyday performance. Gaps in research include limited studies on middle and older aged adults with moderate to severe IDD, minimal use of self-chosen goals or activities and use of technology as a continuous support. Conclusion: Our findings show a lack of studies for individuals age 30 and above with severe IDD. Additionally, this scoping review highlight that everyday functional performance of adolescents and adults with IDD can be enhanced with the usage of technology based functional interventions utilising VM and prompting methods.

Designing the Food and Lifestyle Information Program (FLIP) culinary nutrition intervention for adults with mild‐to‐moderate intellectual disability

“…53 Support workers overwhelmingly reported that paper-based resources, and breaking cooking tasks into small steps were preferred program formats, which were presented in the pre-pilot and retained in the FLIP program. This is consistent with literature on providing cooking instruction to people with intellectual disability and, although the use of technology is widely used when providing step-by-step cooking instructions, participants are also required to learn to use the technology, 63 and this was out of the scope of the FLIP intervention. Provision of a choice of dishes to prepare and opportunities for social participation, key components that support motivation, 51 were reported by support workers as very important enablers for program participation.…”

Video Modelling to Improve Hand Dexterity in Students with Learning Disabilities: Special Education Teachers' Perspectives

“…Besides, research has found that the outcome of VM intervention to achieve desired skills improved among students with LDs (Campbell et al 2015;Kent et al 2018;Parsons et al 2019;Waldman-Levi et al 2019). Therefore, VM is a strategy that should consider.…”

“…The empirical research supports VM as an effective learning strategy to teach a range of skills. It shares a socially acceptable goal to improve the acquisition of desired skills (Aldi et al 2016;Waldman-Levi et al 2019). The effectiveness of VM has further research on academic skills , play (Kim 2016), social communication (Acar et al 2016;Qi et al 2018), vocational (Rosen et al 2017), employment (Bross et al 2019), activities of daily living (Aldi et al 2016) and behavioural skill (Haydon et al 2016).…”

Procedural Learning through Action Observation: Preliminary Evidence from Virtual Gardening Activity in Intellectual Disability

“…In these last years, the development of new technologies has maximized the efficacy of these therapeutic approaches [28] using smartphones, computer programs, and tablets, which can potentiate the autonomous acquisition of a task at the individual's own pace [55,56].…”