Doctor of Education / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Warren J. White / Since 1990, IDEA has required a transition-focused IEP for adolescents with special needs.
There have been limited data on whether culturally and/or linguistically diverse (CLD) students in
Kansas were receiving transition services to mitigate or remedy their marginalized, disenfranchised,
and dis-empowered status. This study examined transition practices for CLD students with special
needs in Kansas. The hypothesis tested was that Kansas schools address the multicultural needs of
exceptional students in transition practice. There were two research questions. First, do considerations
of multicultural needs figure into transition practices in Kansas schools? Second, are multicultural
needs taken into account to a greater extent in certain areas of transition?
A review of research literature yielded multicultural considerations relevant to the five domains
of transition: 1) self-care, domestic living; 2) recreation and leisure; 3) communication and social
skills; 4) vocational skills; and 5) community participation skills. An Internet survey with 22 Likert
items covering these multicultural needs and concerns was administered via e-mail. A total of 582 valid
e-mail addresses were used, comprising contact information developed from a sample frame of a
KSDE database of resource-room teachers. The survey e-mail and follow-up were sent to every
contact, covering 190 of the 293 unified school districts of Kansas. The completed sample was 178, for
a response rate of 30.58%.
Data were analyzed from the 93 participants whose responses indicated experience as
caseworkers in the past three years on transition-focused IEP teams for at least one student in any of the
three CLD groups of interest in the present study—African Americans, Native American Indians, or
Hispanic/Latinos. Means and standard deviations were calculated for the frequencies of choices on the
22 Likert items. Pearson's chi-square testing was used to determine significance.
Survey results indicated that on 17 of 22 items there was 80% or higher agreement among caseworkers that their school communities were addressing the multicultural needs and concerns of
students and families in transition practices. Discussion includes participants' comments.
Recommendations are given to increase the roles of cultural and linguistic heritages in transition in
Kansas schools, especially in the skill-areas of community participation and communication-and-social
skills.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/13095 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Scott, Robert Bruce |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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