ABSTRACT
The transition from school to community has been a focus of special education since the mid-1980s and transition planning has been mandated in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act since 1992. Much of the nation’s progress toward achieving the goal of ensuring that youth and young adults receiving special education services transition to meaningful post-school outcomes-from independent living to meaningful employment and community inclusion-has been documented by a series of national longitudinal studies, the most recent of which (National Longitudinal Transition Study 2, or NLTS2) completed data collection in 2010. Among the areas of progress tracked by NLTS2 was the degree to which students receiving special education services become more selfdetermined over time. Discussed in more detail subsequently, this is because promoting self-determination and student involvement in transition planning has been shown to be causally related to more positive school and transition outcomes for youth and young adults (Shogren, Palmer, Wehmeyer, Williams-Diehm, & Little, 2012; Shogren, Wehmeyer, Palmer, Rifenbark, & Little, 2015) and to be predictive of more positive quality of life and life satisfaction outcomes (Nota, Ferrari, Soresi, & Wehmeyer, 2007; Shogren, Lopez, Wehmeyer, Little, & Pressgrove, 2006).
