Eileen O’Brien

University Honors with Honors in Special Education

Major: Special Education

Supervisors: Linda Mechling, Special Education

The Use of Computer-Based Video Instruction to Teach Students with Moderate Intellectual Disabilities to Use Public Bus Transportation

This study investigated the effectiveness of Computer Based Video Instruction (CBVI) to teach students with moderate intellectual disabilities to use the public bus transportation system. Students learned a bus route via a computer and were tested as to whether that knowledge generalized to a real world situation. Targeted skills included the ability to recognize predetermined landmarks along the bus route, push the “request to stop bus signal,” and exit the bus upon reaching the target landmark. This project used a single subject design (multiple probes across participants, with one bus route, reproduced across the three selected students), to evaluate the effectiveness of the CBVI program. Students were taught over several sessions on the computer, tested on the computer for competency, and then taken out on the bus for three test rides. All of the instructional sessions occurred in simulation with generalization and maintenance measures conducted in-vivo on the public bus route. Results for the participants indicate that the program was successful. All three students learned the correct location along the bus route for pushing the “request to stop bus signal” and reached 100% performance during computer and generalization trials.