High School Students with Learning Disabilities: Requesting Accommodations in Role‐Play

Abstract

AbstractSelf‐advocacy is an important skill, especially as students transition from high school to postsecondary settings. In this study, five high‐school students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) were taught to use a self‐advocacy intervention to learn to request academic accommodations. A multiple‐baseline across participants design was used to examine the functional relation between the intervention and students’ performance. Students learned the self‐advocacy intervention, consisting of 17 target behaviors, during after‐school sessions across approximately 6 weeks. Based on the visual analysis and percentage of nonoverlapping data, there was strong evidence of a functional relation between the self‐advocacy intervention and an increase in participants’ performance for requesting academic accommodations during role‐play scenarios. Participants maintained self‐advocacy skills 2 weeks after mastery and generalized accommodation requests with other school‐based personnel. Social validity data indicated that participants valued the intervention. Implications for practitioners are discussed for transition and self‐advocacy skills as well as future research opportunities.