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It's Thursday afternoon in the middle of April. James Sandler is sitting on the couch watching television—again. Yesterday he played video games—again. It wasn't this way last year. That's when he was still in high school. He had a part-time job then in a pet store with assistance from the school's employment specialist. James also was learning to ride the city bus to the gym with his community volleyball team and eating at the local pizzeria with the team after games. During the day, he attended biology, world history, and keyboarding classes with his peers and tended plants in the school greenhouse with the gardening club. All that had changed, however, during the year when he hit 22. Now he was out of school and out of services and one day was pretty much like all the others.

Voting represents, arguably, the most important right and responsibility of a citizen in a democracy. Nevertheless, few adults are with an intellectual or developmental disability vote, and few are provided systematic instruction on voting or how to participate in the political process. Regrettably, 44 states have disenfranchisement provisions that prohibit many people with an intellectual disability from voting. These state provisions are in conflict with federal laws, which mandate that citizens with disabilities are guaranteed the same rights as citizens without disabilities. This study is a preliminary investigation of the perspective of a sample of support personnel regarding the value of voting for people with an intellectual or developmental disability and the extent to which they have provided voting instruction to their clients. The findings revealed that very few clients vote, are registered to vote, or are provided any instruction on how to vote or be informed about voting positions. The implications of the findings are discussed, and futures areas of research are suggested.

We evaluated the effects of a social interactive training program on early social-communicative skills (i.e., eye contact, joint attention, motor imitation) of three preverbal preschool children with autism. Training was conducted in the children's classroom during naturally occurring daily activities. Findings indicated that implementation of social interactive training components (i.e., contingent imitation, use of naturally occurring reinforcement, expectant look, environmental arrangement) was associated with increases in target behaviors across participants. In addition, generalization of eye contact and motor imitation behavior were found across an additional setting and different interactive partners, although joint attention rarely generalized. Social validation measures provided by 30 raters indicated that perceived positive changes in performance had occurred in child behaviors and that training procedures were considered acceptable. Results are discussed in terms of implications for research and practice.

Community instruction for individuals with severe disabilities rarely incorporates programming for independence. This article reviews and analyzes investigations of the effects of self-instructional programs on increasing the independence of persons with moderate or severe mental retardation in integrated environments. The conceptual role of self-instruction in promoting behavior change is discussed and variations in self-instructional teaching approaches are analyzed. Overall, the feasibility of teaching persons with severe disabilities to self-instruct to promote acquisition, generalization, and maintenance across diverse skills is supported. Methodological issues related to investigations of self-instruction are discussed, recommendations for implementing self-instructional programs are provided, and directions for future research are proposed.

Despite more than 40 years of legislation to improve the outcomes of children and youth with disabilities and those growing up in poverty, vast numbers of adults with severe disabilities are unemployed or underemployed and living in poverty. This article suggests that one of the factors maintaining the problem is our failure to acknowledge the prevalence and complexity of poverty and its relation to disability and employment. We describe disability as both a cause and an effect of poverty, affecting employment and quality of life of people with severe disabilities— particularly those who are racially and ethnically diverse. We propose strategies to address the challenges caused by the intersection of poverty, disability, and employment and efforts to improve the adult lives of people with severe disabilities.

Increasing the participation of youth with severe disabilities in general education has remained a consistent and prominent focus of legislative, policy, and research initiatives. We examined the perceptions of high school staff regarding the goals, barriers, benefits, outcomes, and supports associated with including adolescents with severe disabilities in general education classes. We found that general and special educators, paraprofessionals, and administrators both converged and diverged in their evaluations of different aspects of general education participation. Despite broad agreement regarding the benefits of and instructional priorities in general education classrooms, stakeholders differed significantly in their perceptions of barriers associated with including students with disabilities in general education classes at their high schools.

Research indicates that peer interaction can have a substantial impact on the lives of adolescents with disabilities. However, social interaction among adolescents with intellectual disabilities and their general education peers typically occurs infrequently in secondary schools. This paper provides a critical analysis of twenty-six empirical interventions aimed at promoting social interaction among adolescents with intellectual disabilities and their general education peers in middle and high school settings. Findings are analyzed with regard to intervention components; student characteristics; interaction settings; measures of interaction; observation procedures; experimental designs; intervention components; and measures of generalization, social validity, and treatment integrity. Based upon findings from this literature, we present recommendations to guide future research and the development of effective social interaction interventions for adolescents with intellectual disabilities in middle and high schools.

This study combined communication book training, a milieu approach (Warren & Kaiser, 1986), and systematic vocabulary selection to teach a nonspeaking adolescent to communicate in three settings. Specifically, we conducted a systematic replication of Hamilton and Snell's (1993) instructional procedures to teach a high school student from a Spanish-speaking home to use a communication book to initiate conversation and respond to teachers, peers, and work supervisors. The student had mental retardation and was deaf and nonverbal Results indicated rapid learning of communication book use in two settings (i.e., meal preparation and employment training) and more delayed increases in a third setting (i.e., small group communication). Based on these findings, we make suggestions for future research and practice.