Project Description:
We know from our statewide transition project that paid work experiences before high school exit are especially rare for students with severe disabilities in Tennessee(indeed in most states), including in the districts who have agreed to partner with us. Instead, high school and community-based transition programs have focused on campus-based vocational instruction (e.g., school-based enterprises) or short-term career exposure (e.g., job shadowing, short-term job sampling, unpaid training). Even with pre-ETS being rolled out statewide, this VR-funded support is focused on occasional classroom instruction or summer boot camp trainings. Students with severe disabilities are not being placed in jobs by VR while still in school. Thus, we are not expecting any of the students with severe disabilities (i.e., individuals with intellectual disability, autism, or multiple disabilities who also have significant cognitive impairments) in the control group to have paid employment during high school.
We do not want to dictate the types of work-based learning experiences students have in the business-as-usual condition and it would be unethical to prevent them from obtaining a paid job if they chose to pursue this experience. Instead, we will collect data on the transition programming each youth in the control group is receiving and then examine whether and how paid work experiences might have affected group differences in post-hoc analyses. Should this situation occur, the manner in which we account for it will depend on how many students in the control group end up having paid work experience while still in high school. For our primary analyses, we will leave these students in (and do nothing regarding paid work experience except describe it) as it would constitute the treatment-as-usual for these students. If we have just a few control group students with paid work experience in high school, we could run follow-up (exploratory) analyses excluding them from the control group to see how it changes our conclusions. In the unlikely event that we have a larger number of students with paid work experience, we could conduct exploratory analyses comparing three groups: intervention group, control group with paid work experiences, control group with no paid work experiences. In all cases, we will have good documentation of all of their work-based learning experiences of students.
Core Function(s):
Performing Research or Evaluation, Developing & Disseminating Information, Other Direct/Model Services
Target Audience:
Community Trainees / Short term trainees, Professionals and Para-Professionals, Adults with Disabilities, Children/Adolescents with Disabilities/SHCN
