Mary Morningstar

The goal of this project is to design and test a team-based professional development intervention for transition educators—secondary special educators, transition specialists, related services, and support staff. An initial professional development (PD) model, the Transition Coalition Self-Study (TCSS), has shown emerging promise for increasing educators' knowledge of transition assessment with the potential to improve transition IEPs. The original TCSS was a team-based model that used a t...

The purpose of this project is to develop and validate the College and Career Readiness for Transition( CCR4T), a measure of high school students' with disabilities perceptions of their own college and career readiness (CCR). College and career readiness is critical for youth with and without disabilities. While many students lack the necessary academic preparation to enroll and succeed in credit-bearing postsecondary courses, students with disabilities are especially underprepared for enrol...

The purpose of this study is to examine how educational placement affects academic, social/communication, and behavioral outcomes for elementary students with significant cognitive disabilities (SCD). The study will also explore student-, classroom-, and school/district-level factors as potential mediators or moderators of associations between placement and student outcomes. Although researchers have argued that educational placement makes a difference in the type of instruction students wit...

Despite improvements in postschool outcomes for youth with high-incidence disabilities, longitudinal and other research studies demonstrate that successful postschool transitions in the areas of employment, postsecondary education, and engagement in the community continue to elude many youth receiving special education and transition services. In addition, prior research often uses overly simplistic and often dichotomous measures of postschool success that fail to capture the broad range of...