Designing Instructional Activities for Young Handicapped Children

Abstract

In the assessment and prescriptive teaching process, there is generally a one to one correspondence between goals and objectives and curricula. This approach, referred to as one objective-one activity teaching, has been especially successful in teaching new skills to handicapped children under 5 years of age, but it has largely failed in teaching the more severely handicapped of those children how to apply those skills to novel situations. This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of one objective-one activity teaching as well as those of haphazard teaching. It then proposes several new directions that encourage the variety and flexibility of haphazard teaching and the precision of one objective-one activity teaching in the design of activities for preschoolers with handicaps ranging from mild to severe.