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Abstract: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of2004 requires that all students with disabilities participate and progress in the general education curriculum. Although IDEA requires individualized education program (IEP) teams to include academic and life shills goals in a students' as necessary to meet their individual needs, many researchers have raised concerns that the emphasis on the general education curriculum could lead IEP teams to deemphasize goals focused on instruction on life shills which are consistently predictive of improved post-school outcomes for students with a significant cognitive disability (SCD). This study used a direct content analysis to examine the lEPs of 1,103 students with a SCD from four school districts to determine the proportion of goals included in their lEPs that were drawn from the state 's general education curriculum and life shills domains. The authors coded the goals found in student lEPs and used descriptive (i.e., measures of central tendency and variability) and inferential (i.e., Wilcoxon matchedpairs signed-rank test) statistics to analyze the data. We found that students from this sample have a larger proportion of IEP goals related to the academic core standards than IEP goals related to life shills. These fin dings will be discussed in terms of the implications for future research and practice.
The passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 and shortly after, the amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 included changes in educational policy intended to improve academic performance, and ultimately, improve post-school outcomes for students with disabilities. The IDEA Amendments of 2004 require that all students have access to, participate, and progress in the general education curriculum and receive instruction in functional life skills in areas such as daily living skills and employment preparation. Life skills typically are defined as "skills or tasks that contribute to the successful, independent functioning of an individual in adulthood" (Cronin, 1996, p. 54) and encompass several skill domains including domestic, leisure/recreation, and community (e.g., Dymond et al., 2017). Employment preparation is defined as those skills required to be able to perform effectually at ajob (Guy et al., 2009) and comprise several skill domains including job sampling and inschool employment training (e.g., Mazzotti & Test, 2015; McDonnell & Hardman,...