Experiencing postsecondary transition planning

Abstract

Special educators must engage students with special needs in transition planning to help students set and achieve goals with regard to postsecondary education, vocation, community engagement, and independent living. Researchers have examined many aspects of transition planning, but few have examined how students with special needs experience the transition process and the outcome of transition. It is important to examine the student perspective to fill a gap in the literature, to enable schools to develop more effective transition planning services, and to provide these students with a voice. This study used a phenomenological approach to fulfill these goals by examining how students with moderate special needs disabilities describe their experience of planning for and pursuing transition goals, what influenced and affected them in the process, and what the initial outcome of their transition has been. The researcher purposefully sampled six former high school students with moderate special needs disabilities. The data for analysis emerged from in-depth, semi-structured, individual interviews. Using a strategy of open coding, the researcher analyzed and reduced the data to textural and structural descriptions, revealing the essence of transition for students with moderate special needs disabilities. The findings suggest that the nature of participant interaction with special education teachers within a specific high school setting affects the participants' experience of transition planning and the initial outcome of their transition. Improving transition planning requires understanding how student interaction at the individual, classroom, and school levels affects whether students acquire the skills and attributes needed to make a successful postsecondary transition.