551281

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RSEXXX10.1177/0741932514551281Remedial and Special EducationWehmeyer

Article
Remedial and Special Education
2015, Vol. 36(1) 2023
Hammill Institute on Disabilities 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0741932514551281
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Framing the Future: SelfDetermination

Michael L. Wehmeyer, PhD1

Abstract
There is an established and still-growing evidence base that promoting self-determination has positive school and postschool benefits for students with disabilities, and yet efforts to do so remain sporadic, at best. This article examines the
evidence that promoting self-determination is critically important for students with disabilities, explores reasons such
efforts are not wide-spread, and provides recommendations to remedy this situation.
Keywords
self-advocacy/self-determination, instruction to promote, assessment
In 1990, I was hired to direct a federally funded model demonstration project to develop a curriculum to promote the
self-determination of adolescents with intellectual disability. Eventually, the U.S. Department of Education, Office of
Special Education Programs (OSEP), would fund 26 projects to promote self-determination (Wehmeyer, 1999).
From the first publication from that project (Wehmeyer,
1992) to today, I have had the unique opportunity to watch
an idea take root and grow, from an untested hypothesis
that students with disabilities will achieve more positive
school and post-school outcomes if they are more selfdeterminedto an evidence-based practice. There were
times along the way that I thought a focus on promoting
self-determination would be one of any number of policydriven fads that had its moment in the sun, then faded away.
However, for a number of reasonsresearch findings, policy directives, advocacy initiativesthis was not the case
and, as I see it, in the early years of the 21st century, the
field hit a tipping point in which student self-determination
became an accepted variable that moderated and mediated
important school and adult-life outcomes for students with
disabilities.
Self-determination is a
dispositional characteristic manifested as acting as the causal
agent in ones life. Self-determined people (i.e., causal agents)
act in service to freely chosen goals. Self-determined actions
function to enable a person to be the causal agent is his or her
life. (Shogren et al., in press)

students with disabilities were less self-determined than

their peers (Wehmeyer & Metzler, 1995), (b) devising
assessments to drive research and intervention evaluation
(Wehmeyer, 1996), (c) developing interventions to promote
self-determination and educationally valued outcomes
(Wehmeyer, Palmer, Agran, Mithaug, & Martin, 2000), (d)
determining teacher implementation of practices linked to
self-determination (Wehmeyer, Agran, & Hughes, 2000),
(e) establishing a relationship between self-determination
and more positive outcomes for youth (Wehmeyer &
Palmer, 2003), (f) establishing the role of promoting selfdetermination in school reform (Wehmeyer, Field, Doren,
Jones, & Mason, 2004), and (g) showing a causal link
between promoting self-determination and more positive
school and post-school outcomes (Shogren, Palmer,
Wehmeyer, Williams-Diehm, & Little, 2012).
I use research conducted by myself and my colleagues to
illustrate this progression, but of course, there were many
others making equally important contributions to knowledge and practice in self-determination over this time
(Algozzine, Browder, Karvonen, Test, & Wood, 2001;
Carter, Lane, Pierson, & Glaeser, 2006; Cobb, Lehmann,
Newman-Gonchar, & Morgen, 2009; Field, Sarver, & Shaw,
2003; Fowler, Konrad, Walker, Test, & Wood, 2007;
Stancliffe, Abery, & Smith, 2000; Ward & Meyer, 1999;
Zhang, 2001). I cannot capture the contributions of colleagues with whom I have worked in the space allotted to
1

People who are causal agents make or cause things to happen in their lives. That we are at this place at this time with
regard to issues pertaining to self-determination is the result
of a process involving research: (a) establishing that

University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

Corresponding Author:
Michael L. Wehmeyer, University of Kansas, 1200 Sunnyside Avenue,
Room 3136, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.
Email: wehmeyer@ku.edu

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Wehmeyer
me, more or less the important contributions of the many
other researchers who have contributed to the knowledge
base.
So, that is the first of the points to make with regard to
the most significant advances in the area of promoting the
self-determination of children and youth with disabilities;
we have as strong an evidence base for the importance of
self-determination to successful school and post-school outcomes as we have for any transition-related practice. In
the past several years, findings from large, randomized trial
studies of efforts to promote self-determination with adolescents with disabilities have established a causal effect
(with multiple interventions) on (a) student involvement in
educational planning (Martin et al., 2006; Wehmeyer,
Palmer, Lee, Williams-Diehm, & Shogren, 2011), (b)
enhanced self-determination (Palmer, Wehmeyer, Shogren,
Williams-Diehm, & Soukup, 2012; Wehmeyer, Palmer,
Shogren, Williams-Diehm, & Soukup, 2012; Wehmeyer,
Shogren, et al., 2012), (c) access to the general education
curriculum and educational goal attainment (Shogren et al.,
2012), and (d) more positive employment and community
inclusion outcomes (Powers et al., 2012; Shogren et al., in
press).
This leads to my second point and the points I will make
with regard to next steps. Despite this knowledge, all available evidence suggests that efforts to promote self-determination remain fringe activities, occurring only when a
dedicated educator or administrator decides to elevate such
efforts to the forefront (Eisenman & Chamberlin, 2001;
Sands, Spencer, Gliner, & Swaim, 1999; Thoma, Pannozzo,
Fritton, & Bartholomew, 2008; Wehmeyer, Agran, et al.,
2000; Wehmeyer & Schwartz, 1998).
Why is this so? There are many reasons, but among them
is not that promoting self-determination is not relevant to
educational school reform; it clearly is. It is in the context of
school reform efforts that I situate the points I make with
regard to next steps in improving educational outcomes for
youth for whom typical instruction is not effective by promoting self-determination. First, of course, we need more
research and intervention development efforts, but we need
to do so in the context of all students, and not only students
with disabilities. As the field moves toward multi-tiered
systems of supports (MTSS) models that emphasize high
quality interventions for all students in the context of the
general education curriculum and classroom, interventions
to promote self-determination should be among those Tier 1
interventions implemented. To achieve this, we need assessments that measure the self-determination of all students,
and not just students with disabilities. My colleagues and I
are currently evaluating a new assessment that will meet
that demand, and as we engage into the next decades work,
it will be, increasingly, focused on promoting the self-determination of all students, including students with disabilities, in typical school settings and contexts.

I have come to believe, however, that evidence of efficacy is necessary but not sufficient. Why is it that practice
to promote self-determination remains limited and often
tied to a single teacher or administrator who prioritizes such
efforts? In part, I think it is because of how disability itself
is understood within the field. For most of the history of the
field, special education has been used not as the
IndividualsWith Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has
defined it (specially designed instruction) but as an adjective, to describe a student (she is a special education student) or a place (he goes to special education; Wehmeyer, in
press). Unfortunately, we are now hearing educators referring to students as a Tier 3 student (Shogren, Wehmeyer,
Lane, & Quick, 2014) in the same manner.
If we continue to view disability using models that
emphasize deficits, I believe that efforts to promote selfdetermination will remain marginalized. So, as a second
point in next steps, we, as a field, need to embrace strengthsbased models of disability. Increasingly around the world,
disability is being framed not as a defect within a person but
as a gap between the persons strengths and the demands of
the environment or context (Shogren et al., in press).
Educational efforts utilizing such models focus on reducing
that gap by enhancing personal capacity and modifying the
environment. Fortunately, innovative intervention models in
schoolsincluding MTSS (and its component parts,
Positive Behavior Supports and Response to Intervention)
and Universal Design for Learningare predicated on these
social ecological models of disability, focusing on reducing
the gap between personal capacity and the demands of the
environment by enhancing the former (capacities) and modifying the latter (contexts). That it is students who are referred
to as Tier 2 or Tier 3 and not interventions illustrates the
fact that when we approach innovative practices with an old
and outdated understanding of disability, we simply repeat
the sins of the past. And, because promoting self-determination and student-directed learning is at the heart of strengthsbased educational efforts, the continuation of old ways of
understanding disability will, ultimately, work to keep
efforts to promote self-determination at the margins.
There are numerous other next steps that warrant more
consideration than space allows. It is clear that there is still
confusion in the field pertaining to how practitioners understand the construct. I have talked with school personnel
who indicated that they had tried self-determination, but it
didnt work. On further exploration, it was clear that they
had implemented a particular version of a student involvement program that, for whatever reason, did not fit in that
school district. Self-determination is too often equated only
with making a choice or running an Individualized
Education Program (IEP) meeting, instead of more accurately with acting volitionally, making things happen in
ones life, and being the causal agent in ones life. This is as
much a function, I think, of our teacher preparation system

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Remedial and Special Education 36(1)

as anything else. It is my sense that teachers-to-be receive

limited instruction on what it means to promote self-determination and how to do so, and that teachers preparing to
work with some populations of students receive almost no
such instruction. Research suggests that one of the primary
ways that teachers learn about self-determination is by
attending sessions at conferences. While its positive they
are getting the message there, there many teachers who are
not able to attend conferences.
All in all, however, I want to end my comments on a
positive note. True, there is much yet to do . . . that is both
good news and bad news. That, 25 years after the OSEP
model demonstration initiative, efforts to promote selfdetermination are accepted as effective practice in the field
and that there are evidence-based practices that support
teachers to achieve this is very good news indeed. I believe
that the present time, with the emergence of MTSS and
whole school efforts to promote inclusion and quality education, provides unique opportunities to infuse efforts to
promote self-determination into the curriculum for all students, not excluding students with disabilities.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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