External and Internal Access to Vocational Education for Handicapped Students in Illinois

182 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983.This study was designed to assess the extent to which mildly handicapped students in secondary schools in Illinois were afforded access to vocational and industrial arts curricula. It also examined the extent to which differences existed across demographic and status variables of those students in the quality and content of that vocational education, and the nature of vocational assessment information of the students' IEPs.The 1981-1982 child-counts from a random sample of 98 school districts in Illinois were reviewed. All handicapped students in the categories of educable mentally handicapped, learning disabled, educationally handicapped, and behaviorally disordered were included in the study, resulting in a sampling frame of 3,098 students. Data on these students were then collected along the variables of disability, ethnicity, sex, restrictiveness of educational environment, school size, school wealth, and whether or not vocational education was listed as a related service for the student.Finally, a random sample of 377 students was selected for further study. The 1981-1982 IEPs and course enrollment schedules of these students were reviewed on site, and data were collected identifying the extent to which these students were involved in vocational and industrial arts education coursework, and had vocationally-related information on their IEPs.Results from this research suggested: (1) Handicapped students were enrolled in vocational and industrial arts courses in substantially higher numbers and proportions than had been previously thought, as reported in national datasets such as the VEDS and OCR studies. (2) Differential treatment did appear to exist across various disability groups, but was much less clear in relationship to ethnicity or sex variables. (3) The major reporting systems in vocational and special education in Illinois were not concurrently valid nor were they internally reliable in their ability to project access to and equity in vocational education for handicapped students. (4) Vocational assessment information frequently appeared on IEPs, but was largely the result of informal observations of student interest and/or prior vocational education classroom achievement.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD