The objective of this study was to implement an 8-month diet and exercise program for obese persons with mental retardation in the community, and to assure the formation and long-term maintenance of appropriate diet and exercize in their daily lives. To encourage the target behaviors on a daily basis, a two-fold support system was introduced. The "Living Skill Support Tool" consisted of two factors: (a) a "prompt tool" which facilitates the acquisition or perforrnance of the target skills by developing the native abilities of the handicapped persons, and (b) the opportunities for the handicapped persons and their guardians to evaluate each other by keeping a record of their own behaviors. The "Community Suport Laboratory" provided support on a regular basis until the target behavior was acquired. The four handicapped persons who underwent the prograrm in fact acquired the desired habits; they lost frorm two to five kg in weight, and at the Follow-up 15 months after completion of the program were found to have maintained that weight. Also, the persons able to follow this program gained social validation. Strategies to encourage the person to perform the target behavior in daily life and maintain it for the long term are discussed from the standpoint of the support system for the family.

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This study evaluated procedures for using video modeling to teach shopping skills to a 16-year old student with Downs syndrome. Through ecological assessrrment, certain shopping skills were selected as the target behaviors. Before instruction began, a task analysis was clone on situations encountered while shopping and the video tape mataterial was produced accordingly. The series of target behaviors included selecting products from a shopping list, paying for them (operational step) and asking the locations of products (social step). The instruction concsisted of three phases: phase I (video modeling), phase II (video modeling + discritminative training), and phase III (video modeling + discrirninative training + prompt). The results showed that the operational steps could be acquired through video modeling while prompts during an actual shopping excursion were necessary for the acquisition of the social steps. The effectiveness of using shopping lists and/or prompts together with video modeling was thus suggested for the acquisition of shopping skills.

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Randomization tests have been proposed as a valid statistical method for analyzing the data from single-case design studies. Randomization tests can be used if the data have a serial dependency. Several researchers have suggested that randormization tests could be applied to various single-case designs. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a variety of randomization methods, including the random assignment of treatments to measurement times, the random assignment of interventions within a measurement sequence, and the random assignment of treatments to phases.

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We are developing a Visual Basic-based control system for behavioral experiments. This system enables us to obtain responses from a touch screen mounted on a liquid crystal display and to control the operation of a token dispenser via a PC (PCMCIA) card for a parallel input/output unit. The Visual Basic programming consists of placing Controls on Forms, setting Properties, and describing Codes. These correspond to reading in control parameters, setting data for the specification of stimuli, and coding logical calculations in an experiment-control program. Visual Basic provides Timer controls for timing but they are not accurate. However, the accuracy of the timers can be improved by using Windows Application Programming Interface (API) to the extent allowable for the running of experiments.

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