Transition Assessment: The Process Can Be As Important As the Results

In preparation for an IEP, one of my ninth grade students was completing the Student/Parent Questionnaire while a 10^th grade student was working independently. The student completing the questionnaire asked me to clarify the following question: Are you presently in contact with any agencies that will or maybe involved with you after graduation? The student's request started a dialogue between the three of us that included VITAL, Career Connections, Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Services and “learning centers” at institutions of post-secondary education. Both students expressed interests in these services and I explained to them the importance of making connections during their 11^th grade year. The dialogue continued to include how these agencies could assist them in their future goals. I came away from the discussion with the feeling that the perspective of the students' changed from the short term of “getting the assignment due finished” to the long term of how that assignment fit into their future. Without the process of the student completing the assessment, any discussion of the agencies would have probably been a one sided lecture rather than a dialogue initiated by the student. To make it easier for everyone to use the assessments I have created an easy to remember shortcut to the assessment site: http://tinyurl.com/transitionassessment. I am currently working on converting the assessments found in the Quick Book of Transition Assessments.

Transfer Functional Skills

I have completed all of the assessments in the Transfer Functional Skills section of the Quick Book of Transition Assessments. These assessments can be used to measure the discrepancy between the required skills and the current skills of the student's post secondary expectations. The section contains four different types of post secondary expectations (Supported Employment, Vocational Training, Four Year College and Competitive Employment). The majority of the skills are contained in all four assessments, so if the team decides the current expectation is not realistic, the data can be applied to a more appropriate expectation. The section also contains a Vocational Evaluation and a Functional Skills Inventory. The Vocational Evaluation produces a score that could be used for goal setting as it would be easy to graph. However, the evaluation contains fifty behaviors so it would be better to focus on the deficient behaviors. To see these assessments go to the Quick Book of Transition Assessments page on the Broeg Google Doc Transition Assessments website.