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Promoting self-determination is critical to enabling young people to achieve education-related goals and positive postschool employment, community participation, and quality of life outcomes. By developing skills associated with self-determination such as choice-making, decision-making, problem solving, goal setting and attainment, planning, self-management, self-advocacy, self-awareness, and self-knowledge, students with disabilities are better prepared to make purposeful decisions and choices. We conducted a meta-analysis of the literature on interventions to promote self-determination and associated skills with students with disabilities in the school context. We analyzed the types of interventions, populations of students with whom they were implemented, outcomes, and rigor of research. Results demonstrated that interventions to promote self-determination can be effective for students across grade levels, disability labels, and settings. There remains a need for increased focus on promoting self-determination within inclusive, general education settings with students with and without disabilities and of diverse backgrounds. Future researchers should also focus on the rigor of methodological design and associated reporting when conducting school-based research. Additional implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI) is an evidence-based practice designed to enable teachers to teach students to self-regulate problem solving to set and attain educationally relevant goals. This study reports on findings and outcomes of the first year of a statewide implementation of the SDLMI by teachers working with students with intellectual disability to promote skills, knowledge, and beliefs that will lead to opportunities for meaningful, integrated employment. Data are reported on teacher fidelity of implementation of the SDLMI, student and teacher ratings of self-determination, student ratings of transition empowerment, and teacher ratings of student goal attainment. Data from the first year of the longitudinal implementation suggest that teachers can implement the SDLMI with fidelity, that students attain educationally relevant goals, and that teachers report changes in aspects of student self-determination, and that the SDLMI can be implemented statewide with school-, district-, and state-level supports. Recommendations for future research and policy-related implications for scaling-up efforts to promote self-determination are provided.

This study examined the differential impact of implementing the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI) alone with implementing the SDLMI combined with Whose Future Is It? with transition aged students with intellectual disability in a cluster randomized trial in the state of Rhode Island. The state of Rhode Island is implementing systemic change in transition services and supports under the auspices of a Consent Decree entered into by the state with the U.S. Department of Justice. One area of focus is promoting self-determination during transition planning in the school context as a means to affect employment trajectories. This study focused on the impact of self-determination instruction on self-determination outcomes while youth were still in school, given research establishing a relationship between self-determination and employment outcomes. Latent mediation models suggested that students in the SDLMI-only group reported significant increases in their self-determination scores from baseline to the end of the year, and teachers of students in the SDLMI-only group saw students’ goal attainment as predicting change in self-determination over the course of the year. Teachers reported significant changes in student self-determination in the SDLMI + Whose Future Is It? group. Implications for individualizing interventions to teach skills associated with self-determination in the context of planning and setting goals for the transition to integrated employment are discussed.

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Goal setting and attainment is often a targeted outcome in the intellectual and developmental disabilities field; however, standardizing the measurement of attainment of individualized goals is challenging. The purpose of this article is to introduce a four-domain framework that provides a series of questions to research and evaluation teams in planning for the use of goal attainment scaling (GAS) as an outcome measure at the individual or aggregate level. We intend to stimulate discussion and ongoing work to further systematize how GAS is used in (a) intervention research to establish evidence-based practices and (b) practice to assess the extent to which interventions and supports lead to intended outcomes. The goal is to promote a clear planning process to inform data collection on individualized goal attainment outcomes that are rooted in goals and outcomes valued by people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The purpose of this study was to examine self-determination outcome data in the year following a one-year cluster randomized controlled trial (C-RCT) comparing the impacts of a Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI) only condition to a SDLMI + Whose Future Is It? (SDLMI + WF) condition. Using multilevel B-spline model analysis with Bayesian estimation, we examined ongoing patterns of growth after the trial ended and all students were exposed to SDLMI + WF. The findings suggest that the inclusion of an additional year of outcome data provided additional insight into the impact of more intensive intervention conditions over time. Specifically, after the initial year of implementation, the SDLMI + WF condition predicted greater annual gains than the SDLMI only condition, unlike findings in the first year which reflected the opposite pattern. This evidence suggests a nonlinear growth pattern over multiple years of intervention with more intensive interventions. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

There is a strong link between the development of skills associated with self-determination (i.e., choice-making, decision-making, problem solving, goal setting and attainment, planning, self-management, self-advocacy, self-awareness, and self-knowledge) and positive school (e.g., academic achievement) and postschool (e.g., employment, community access) outcomes. In this article, we advocate for an examination of research related to the impact, usability, and cultural sustainability of an evidence-based intervention intended to enable students to enhance skills associated with self-determination, the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI), when used to support students with extensive support needs, including students with intellectual and developmental disability (IDD). Theoretical foundations of the construct of self-determination and its applicability for all people and extant research on implementation of the SDLMI and students with extensive support needs are presented. Implications for researchers are addressed, including the impact, usability, and cultural sustainability of the SDLMI for students with extensive support needs, and the potential of the SDLMI to support all students in inclusive settings when implemented as a universal support.