Observational Learning by Children Who Are Mentally Retarded: A Study in the Training of Conservation Skills.

Abstract

Children who were mildly mentally retarded were compared with children of average intelligence on the learning of conservation skills using either Observational Learning or Direct Instruction methods. Both groups benefitted from Direct Instruction but the retarded children acquired only pseudo-conservation from Observational Learning: their learning was not tenacious and did not generalize to other conservation behaviour.