Cooking Up Success: Non-Immersive Virtual Reality to Teach Independent Living Skills

Food-preparation skills are important independent living skills for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that support postschool success. Researchers have long explored how technology-based interventions can support students with ASD in acquiring independent living skills. An emerging technology-based intervention to support independent living skills is virtual reality (VR). Through this single-case design study, researchers explored if a non-immersive VR was effective in teaching food-preparation skills (i.e., one student focused on the stove and two on the microwave) to three Black high school students with ASD educated in an urban fringe district. Through this pilot small-n study, the researchers found a functional relation between the non-immersive VR and the dependent variable of independent accuracy in completing the targeted food-preparation tasks within the VR system; all Tau effect sizes were over .75, suggestive of a large effect for each participant. Yet, the results are limited by the small sample size of the single-case design. Researchers also determined students could generalize at least once the targeted food-preparation tasks in a real kitchen with moderate to high levels of accuracy. Implications of this study included that non-immersive VR can support secondary students with ASD in acquiring independent living skills and, to some extent, supports students generalizing skills from virtual settings to the real world.