ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several strategies for providing environmental supports to adults with mental retardation. The focus is on adults because by adulthood people are expected to be self-supporting and living independently. One of the assumptions of the 1992 American Association on Mental Retardation definition is that people with mental retardation can make improvements in life functioning with appropriate environmental supports. One environmental approach used to improve the level of independence experienced by adults with mental retardation is systematic instruction. People with mental retardation often have difficulty responding to the cues in the natural environment that tell people without disabilities how to perform. The most intensive level of prompting used in the community-living-skills literature is physical guidance, by which the learner is physically assisted through the response. This type of prompting has been used most often with people with severe and profound mental retardation.
