Self-Advocacy Programming: A Necessary Component for Collegiate Students Living with Disabilities

Collegiate students living with disabilities face unique challenges; however, Field, Sarver, and Shaw (2003) and Walker and Test (2011) indicate that the development of self- advocacy skills increases the likelihood of overall academic success. Self-advocacy skill acquisition positively impacts postsecondary employment transitions and outcomes as well. White et al. (2014) indicates that honing self-advocacy skills enables smooth transitions into postsecondary employment; furthermore, Roessler and Rumrill (1998), Meaux et al. (2009), and Stamp et al. (2014) posit that students who engage in self-advocacy experience better employment outcomes after graduation. Providing students an opportunity to learn about their rights under the ADA (1990) and ADAA (2008) empowers them to initiate accommodation processes after college once employment begins. This research assesses the effectiveness of self-advocacy workshops offered through an office of Disability Support Services at a mid-sized regional university in the southeast. Data will be collected using the College Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) prior to the workshops and a pre-test/post-test assessing the effectiveness of the workshops. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted after workshops end. Preliminary analyses indicate a statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores in the confidence of students’ ability to speak up for oneself (p \u3c .001) and request reasonable accommodations from future employers (p \u3c .001). Data collected will provide insight into how effective self-advocacy skills workshops are for current students and into what modifications are necessitated for optimum programming in the future