Pizza Snack Rolls Go Digital: Teaching Real-World Cooking in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR), especially nonimmersive VR, offers an option to support secondary students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in learning life skills, such as food preparation. While an emerging research base exists to support nonimmersive VR in assisting secondary students with IDD in acquiring food preparation skills, the existing literature has paid limited attention to generalization in real-world settings. In this study, researchers employed a multiple-probe across participants’ single case design study with three middle school students with IDD to explore how nonimmersive VR and the system of least prompts (SLP) supported their acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of learning to make pizza snack rolls in a microwave. All three students acquired the skill of making pizza snack rolls in a virtual microwave within the nonimmersive VR system (i.e., virtual environment) following receipt of the intervention package involving the nonimmersive VR and the SLP. The students also maintained their skills of making pizza snack rolls in a virtual microwave within the nonimmersive VR system at higher levels than baseline. However, generalization to making real pizza snack rolls in a real microwave was limited.