Choose and Take Action: Finding the Right Job for You A Vocational Assessment Software Program for

Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities Reference Citation Martin, J. E., Marshall, L. H., L., Wray, D., Wells, L., O’Brien, J., Olvey, G., & Johnson, Z.

(2004). Choose and take action: Finding the right job for you. Longmont, CO: Sopris West.

ChoiceMaker Curriculum Objectives Choose and Take Action enables students to attain these ChoiceMaker Curriculum objectives:

Objective A2. Express employment interests. Objective C2. Indicate options and choose employment goals.

Description The Choose and Take Action program combines interactive software, classroom lessons, and community experiences that enable individuals with mental retardation and other moderate to severe disabilities to make practical career choices. Students watch video segments, select a job that matches their interests, perform the selected job at a community site, evaluate the experience, and then make new choices based on what they learned. The Choose and Take Action instructional activities are designed to teach students numerous self-determination skills, including:

• Choosing from a variety of work options • Planning whether they want to watch or do the activity • Completing the plan in the community setting • Evaluating what they liked and did not like about the setting, activity, and work-site

characteristics, and how the students did while they were at the setting • Using the information gained in the experience to make the next choice

The Choose and Take Action software also introduces students to a variety of job and career possibilities while teaching them to identify what is most important to them about a job: the setting, the activity, or the characteristics.

Settings Activities Characteristics

auto dealer / mechanic assemble & disassemble spacious

construction site bag items & bring in carts cozy space

factory bus tables noisy

florist/greenhouse/ nursery care for animals quiet

grocery store care for people inside

hospital / nursing home care for plants outside

hotel heavy cleaning wear own clothes

janitorial service laundry wear a uniform

landscape / outdoor maintenance light cleaning many people

office move materials few people

restaurant filing messy

retail paper work clean

school / child care stock shelves

vet office / kennel / grooming wash dishes

yard work

Target Population. Choose and Take Action is designed for students and adults with development disabilities, brain injury, and autism who are unable to read and write. The characteristics of students for whom this program will work the best include:

• Students with moderate to significant cognitive needs • Students having difficulties getting information from print • Students who can attend to a computer screen • Students who can follow simple verbal instructions • Students in middle and high school • Students with limited work experience

Development. The development of the Choose and Take Action software program involved numerous steps. First, a group of teachers, adult-service-supported-employment personnel, former students with disabilities, parents, advocates for students with disabilities, and university faculty met to brainstorm. The group identified critical self-determination skills. Next, a project advisory panel (made up of transition specialists, teachers, former students, parents, agency and university personnel, and school administrators) voted on the relative importance of each skill area. Third, the development team, along with representatives from three states, spent several days creating a rough draft of the software specifications and functions. Fourth, the advisory panel reviewed and finalized the software plan. Fifth, the software plan underwent a nationwide social validation process. Experts in transition, self-determination, employment for individuals with disabilities, individuals with disabilities, and parents reviewed the plan. Then, comments and suggestions were incorporated into the software and lessons. Sixth, the software and lessons underwent extensive field-testing in four states, with their findings incorporated into the final product. The Choose and Take Action Cycle. The Choose and Take Action cycle includes four steps. Students complete the first two cycle steps, choice making and plan development, in one session.

Step 1: Choice Making. During choice making, students view pairs of randomly presented videos showing different employment settings, activities, and job characteristics (see Figure 22). From each pair, students select the one they like the best. After they have viewed all the videos once, the ones they chose the first time are paired and the students choose again. This continues until students choose one final video option to try. Then, students develop a plan.

Step 2: Plan. During the planning part of the program, students determine if they want to watch someone do the activity at their selected setting or if they actually want

to do the activity. Printed plans are produced and shown with pictures that the students chose: the setting, activity, two characteristics, and whether they want to watch or do the activities. The evaluation questions regarding these choices are also printed on the plan.

Step 3: Try It. Based on the plan, the student goes into the community to “try it” at the chosen setting. Students will interact with the workers at the site as much as possible as they watch or do the activity. Step 4: Evaluate and Adjust. Students, with the instructor’s guidance, evaluate the

experience, then enter that information into the computer. Students then choose again based on what they learned about their interests.

With each step, the teacher provides only instruction that the students require to complete the step independently. Of course, an educator will need to arrange and coordinate the details involved in visiting a ”try-it” site. The Choose and Take Action software is designed for students with limited work experience; therefore, it is critical for students to complete the process a number of times in order to try many different things. Video clips. The software contains 31, 20-second video clips, across 14 employment settings and 15 activities. Twelve characteristics, each shown at least four times, are also included in the 31 video clips. Each video clip shows an employment setting, an entry-level activity, and two characteristics of the job. For each setting, there are two or three video clips showing different activities, and each activity shown in at least two settings. The teacher may limit the number of video clips that a student sees in a session. Settings and activities shown in the video clips represent entry-level jobs and include most job categories in the Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook. The jobs represent opportunities that are available in most communities. Importance of Try-It. Students in the target population may have difficulty generalizing from what is depicted in the video to a real setting. The videos give more information than a text or pictured version of an employment interest inventory, but they still do not exactly replicate community settings students visit. Students must go to the settings and try it to make their choices meaningful. Reports. The software records students’ choices throughout the program and creates reports indicating students’ choices in the choose, plan, and evaluate sections. There is also a place for instructors to record their observations and notes about the students’ experiences and their

discussions. The software will graph the results on simple bar graphs (see Figure 23). Reports and graphs will help students and IEP teams to witness students’ emerging interests and skill trends. These reports, including the instructor’s evaluations and observations, may be included in a student portfolio. This provides information about students’ preferences for IEP meetings and vocational assessments. This will give students a starting place for employment decision-making. Research Documenting Effectiveness Martin, Flexer, Daviso, Ackerman, Sale, Sylvester, and Izzo (2003) found that the choices students made using the Choose and Take Action program correlate highly with the results of the Becker Reading Free Interest Inventory. They also discovered that student chosen job characteristics, tasks, and setting preferences did not match their caretakers’ choices. Martin, Woods, Sylvester, and Gardner (2005) wanted to determine if vocational choices made by participants with moderate to severe cognitive and physical disabilities matched vocational choices made on their behalf by their caregivers or support staff. Eight individuals with severe disabilities and 11 caregivers participated in the study. The job-seeking participants had limited to no previous community work experience. Caregiver and support staff ranked the top three settings, characteristics and activities for the job seekers. Using the Choose and Take Action vocational assessment software, job seekers indicated their own setting, characteristics, and activities choices. Martin et al. then compared job seekers’ choices to those made by their caregivers. The comparison between the setting, activity, and characteristic choices that caregivers believed individuals with disabilities wanted versus what individuals themselves chose produced two major findings. First, support staff, parents, and teachers matched any of the top three setting, activity, and characteristic choices made by the job-seeking individuals with disabilities less than a third of the time. Second, top ranked caregiver activity and characteristic selections never matched the top ranked choices made by individuals with disabilities, and the setting choices only matched twice for an 18% agreement. These results strongly indicate that when given the opportunity to make a real choice and act upon that choice by trying the job in the community, individuals with severe disabilities who used the Choose and Take Action software program clearly expressed their choices in ways unknown to their closest caregivers. These informed choices seldom matched those made by their caregivers, even though the caregivers in this study all believed that they knew what the individual they cared for wanted in a job.

References

Martin, J. E., Flexer, R., Daviso, A., Ackerman, G., Sale, P., Sylvester, L., & Izzo, M. (2003).

Vocational choicemaking for students with severe disabilities. Presentation at the 12th International DCDT Conference, Roanoke, VA.

Martin, J. E., Woods, L. L., Sylvester, L., & Gardner, J. E. (2005). A challenge to self-

determination: Disagreement between the vocational choices made by individuals with severe disabilities and their caregivers. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 30, 147-153.