Building Effective and Meaningful Individualized Education Programs for Secondary Aged Students
Funded by the Institute of Education Science

The purpose of this grant is to improve the development, implementation and monitoring of IEPs at the secondary level. For the IEP to be effective in impacting post-school outcomes, as intended and mandated through IDEA, IEP case managers must change the process used to develop IEPs. We propose to develop a professional development training model that will result in more meaningful and effective IEPs. We will develop and pilot test a professional development model that includes content, strategies, methods, and application activities that IEP case managers can use toimprove the development, implementation and monitoring of appropriate and effective IEPsfor students 16 years of age and older.

The research activities will be conducted across suburban/metropolitan high schools located in Oregon. The sample will include case managers of students 16 years of age and older who are responsible for developing, implementing, and monitoring student IEPs. During a two year development phase, 20 case managers will be recruited. During the first year of pilot testing, we will recruit an additional 20 case managers who will be randomly assigned to one of two conditions (treatment or wait-list control). We will randomly select 3 IEPs for review from each case manager. During the second year of pilot testing, the 10 case managers previously in the wait-list control group will receive treatment and we will recruit 10 additional case managers to serve as controls. We will conduct document reviews of each case manager’s IEPs. We will randomly select 10 IEPs for review from each case manager. The case managers randomly assigned to the control condition, will continue with “business as usual.”

In this Goal two Type A project, we will develop and pilot a professional development training model, targeting IEP case managers of secondary aged students. The professional development will consist of initial intensive content and application training and ongoing theory to extended practice. The intervention will be structured by a theorectical framework and set of premises that research suggests will result in appropriate and effective IEPs for transition-aged students.

The research activities in this project will occur across two interconnected phases. In Phase I (Years 1-2) we will use mixed-methods and design-based research to inform the development of our intervention. In Phase II (Years 3-4) we will use experimental research methods to obtain preliminary evidence that there is a relationship between exposure to our intervention and student IEPs.

We will measure the following IEP features: a) presence of critical components of the transition regulations (i.e. post-school goal, PLEP, course of study, goals /transition activities, b) alignment of these components within the IEP document, and c) the degree to which documented goals/activities are reflected within students’ school days. We will conduct cognitive interviews with case managers to measure the degree of change in the decision-making, strategic planning processes used by case managers in developing, implementing, and monitoring student IEPs. During Phase I, we will use (a) descriptive and inferential statistical techniques including logistical regression, and (b) qualitative data analytic techniques. During Phase II, we will use (a) HLM and (b) qualitative data analytic techniques.