Advocacy and accommodation provision across school environments
Accommodations serve as a key means of access to academic content for students with disabilities. Experts in the field recommend and educational policy stipulates that, given similar task demands, accommodations provided in one environment should be provided in another. Previous research suggests this may not occur in practice. For the current study, accommodation provision across instructional and testing environments as well as across high school and postsecondary environments was examined using data available from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2. Analyses were conducted to explore the extent to which parent and student advocacy predicted accommodation provision across these environments, as well as the extent to which continued accommodation provision from high school to college predicted postsecondary education persistence of students with disabilities. Critical findings included identification of limited consistency in the accommodations provided across environments, a lack of significant relationship between advocacy behaviors of interest and accommodation provision across environments, and a lack of significant relationship between continued accommodation provision and postsecondary education persistence. Separate ad-hoc interviews were conducted to obtain qualitative information on student and parent perspectives regarding obtaining disability supports in high school and college. Interviewee responses highlighted a variety of potential reasons for lack of consistency, including the influence of environmental factors and other supports that eliminated the need for accommodations, a lack of student awareness or desire to access disability supports, and students' informal access of supports in certain settings. It also reflected parents' distal advocacy efforts when students matriculated into college, such as parents encouraging their students to seek disability supports and providing the necessary documentation to access supports. Further exploration of reasons for inconsistent provision is deemed necessary to help understand and seek to improve practices with regard to accommodation provision and use.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Chamberlain, Courtney
- Thesis Advisors
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Witmer, Sara
- Committee Members
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Bouck, Emily
Konstantopoulos, Spyros
Mavrogordato, Madeline
- Date Published
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2020
- Subjects
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Students with disabilities
Barrier-free design for students with disabilities
Inclusive education
Social advocacy
School facilities
United States
- Program of Study
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School Psychology - Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree Level
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Doctoral
- Language
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English
- Pages
- viii, 177 pages
- ISBN
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9798641296487
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/4ks4-pz23