Abstract
Categorised as planning documents, individual educational plans (IEPs) purport to provide school-based instruction more closely matched to individual pupils’ skills and needs. The present study investigated the extent to which IEPs contain practically relevant suggestions for teachers to implement in practice. Based on a sample of 112 IEPs from Germany, the support proposals in these documents were examined. Results showed that about half of the entries consisted of conventional, content-specific methods to be carried out in school. In the average IEP, only 30 per cent of the entries contained content that deviated from the curricula for a particular grade level. Another large proportion of support proposals consisted of conventional but content-unspecific methods to be carried out in school. These proposals were mainly catchwords of generic differentiated instruction practices, signalling adequately personalised support towards to the IEPs’ readers but lacking sufficiently clear descriptions to ensure their implementation. Analyses of variance concerning specific contextual and structural characteristics of IEPs made it possible to assess the features of documents with higher potential informational value for teachers and support staff. Overall, most IEPs seem unlikely to fulfil their primary purpose. At the same time, there were indications about how they could be improved.
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