Date of Award

12-1980

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Special Education

Abstract

Public Law 94-142 mandates that each handicapped child have an individualized education program (IEP) which must be based upon the unique needs of the child. Federal legislation requires that IEPs be developed and implemented if state and local education agencies are to receive federal funds. A review of literature indicated that the procedures currently being used to monitor the IEP mandate do not have documented validity or reliability. The purposes of this investigation were to develop, validate, establish reliability, and field test the utility of a checklist designed to monitor IEPs.

To establish content validity, recognized individuals in the area of special education who had familiarity with PL 94-142 were requested to review the checklist to determine if the questions and criteria were representative of the requirements of IEPs found in PL 94-142. The overall percentage of agreement that the items were representative of the requirements was 97.40%. Stability over time was established by the test-retest method, that is, monitors evaluated four randomly selected IEPs with an interval of 1 month between test-retest. The percentage of stability over time was 91.50%. To establish interjudge reliability, the initial responses of the monitors were analyzed for the percentage of agreement and it found to be 90.42%. A field test was conducted in an administrative unit, consisting of a number of school districts in the state of Colorado, to determine the utility of the checklist. The results of the field test indicated that the checklist was useful as a monitoring instrument.

The results of this investigation indicate that the "Holt's Monitoring Checklist for Individualized Education Programs" has sufficient validity, reliability, and utility for use as a monitoring instrument. It was recommended that further investigation be conducted in the following areas: (a) development of valid and reliable checklists to monitor the other requirements of PL 94-142, and (b) expansion of the literature relating specifically to the development, validation, and establishment of reliability of checklists.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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