Acquisition of Digital Literacy Skills in Learners With Developmental Disabilities

Learners with developmental disabilities often encounter difficulties in performing daily activities that involve digital platforms, operating systems, applications, and other digital tools. Considering the growing importance of digital literacy, we examined the effectiveness of the clustered forward chaining (CFC) procedure in teaching digital transaction skills to three adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). In the context of a multiple-baselines-across-skills design with between-participant replications, we taught participants four digital transaction tasks. The results showed that all participants acquired the four tasks during CFC and maintained their performance post-intervention. Two participants completed the intervention before all clusters were targeted, possibly due to observational learning and continuous performance probes. Furthermore, both the participants and the instructors found CFC to be an acceptable intervention for teaching digital literacy.