Curricular Content of the Individualized Education Programs of Students with a Significant Cognitive Disability

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 requires that all students with disabilities participate and progress in the general education curriculum. Although IDEA requires individualized education program (IEP) teams to include academic and life skills goals in a students' as necessary to meet their individual needs, many researchers have raised concerns that the emphasis on the general education curriculum could lead IEP teams to deemphasize goals focused on instruction on life skills which are consistently predictive of improved post-school outcomes for students with a significant cognitive disability (SCD). This study used a direct content analysis to examine the IEPs of 1,103 students with a SCD from four school districts to determine the proportion of goals included in their IEPs that were drawn from the state's general education curriculum and life skills domains. The authors coded the goals found in student IEPs and used descriptive (i.e., measures of central tendency and variability) and inferential (i.e., Wilcoxon matchedpairs signed-rank test) statistics to analyze the data. We found that students from this sample have a larger proportion of IEP goals related to the academic core standards than IEP goals related to life skills. These findings will be discussed in terms of the implications for future research and practice.

Automated summary

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) requires that students with disabilities have individualized education programs (IEPs) that include goals related to both the general education curriculum and life skills. However, this study found that students' IEP goals were more focused on academic core standards and less on life skills.