This manual offers practical guidelines validated by research for applying instructional strategies to adults with mental retardation who are learning community-based tasks. It provides a sequenced strategy for: (1) selecting person-centered instructional goals; (2) developing quality task analyses of community-based, chained tasks; (3) selecting instructional strategies and environments that promote generalization and maintenance; and (4) collecting "user-friendly" data for making decisions. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 details the development of instructional applications using these four steps and covers: individual choice of goal, age-appropriateness of goal, critical steps of the task analysis, instruction in simulated or natural settings, planning for generalization, chaining procedures, prompting strategies, group or individual instruction, format of data collection, and frequency of data collection. Chapter 3 offers two detailed case applications. (Contains 54 references.) (DB)