Promoting the Self-Determination of Students with Visual Impairments: Reducing the Gap between Knowledge and Practice

Abstract

Despite current interest in promoting self-determination, the extent to which self-determination instruction is provided to students with visual impairments remains uncertain. The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of a sample of teachers of students with visual impairments about issues that are related to self-determination.

A Social–Ecological Analysis of the Self-Determination Literature

“…One of the most consistently analyzed variables in the self-determination literature is disability label (Agran, Hong, & Blankenship, 2007;Carter et al, 2006;Shogren et al, 2007;Wehmeyer, Palmer, Shogren, Williams-Diehm, & Soukup, 2013;. Researchers have established that disability label influences relative levels of selfdetermination.…”

“…In several studies researchers have found that that students with lower levels of cognitive capacity tend to report lower levels of self-determination (Shogren et al, 2007;Wehmeyer et al, 2012). Other researchers have reported differences between students with differing disability characteristics (e.g., emotional disturbance and learning disabilities; Carter et al, 2006), and still others have suggested the need to attend to specific support needs associated with different disabilities, including visual impairments (Agran et al, 2007) and autism (Wehmeyer, Shogren, Zager, Smith, & Simpson, 2010). In a recent study, Shogren, Kennedy, Dowsett, and Little (in press) examined the relative levels of three of the four essential characteristics of selfdetermination (i.e., autonomy, psychological empowerment, self-realization) using data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 in students across the 12 disability categories recognized under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (i.e., autism, deaf-blindness, emotional disturbance, hearing impairment, intellectual disability, learning disability, multiple disabilities, orthopedic impairment, other health impairment, speech and language impairment, traumatic brain injury, and visual impairment) finding significant variability within and across disability groups, suggesting that while disability influences self-determination, other factors also exert a significant influence.…”

The Antecedents and Outcomes of Autonomous Behaviors: Modeling the Role of Autonomy in Achieving Sustainable Employment for Deaf Young Adults

“…Despite the understanding that self-determination development requires opportunity, real-world opportunities to exercise self-determined behaviors are frequently limited for students with disabilities (e.g., Agran et al 2007). Students with disabilities face contextual challenges including reduced access to participation in extracurricular activities, difficulty gathering the needed information for decision making, and unhelpful feedback regarding their strengths and limitations, which may result in an external locus of control which weakens their sense of volition and sense of career maturity (Biller 1985).…”

Students with visual impairments in Israel: quality of life as a subjective experience

“…Indeed, quality of life is the sense the person has that the environment is compatible with one ' s set of expectations, wishes, beliefs and values. This defi nition of the subjective feature of quality of life presents a certain diffi culty in empirical studies based on objective measures of assessment (13) .…”