EXAMINING THE MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE OF THE TRANSITION ASSESSMENT AND GOAL GENERATOR ACROSS PERCENT OF TIME SPENT IN GENERAL EDUCATION

Abstract

Federal law mandates that educators use transition assessment data when they develop their students with disabilities’ IEP transition plans. Transition assessments typically provide scores for educators to include in transition plans, but educators must develop annual transition goals from those scores on their own. The Transition Assessment and Goal Generator (TAGG) was designed to bridge the gap between transition assessment scores and the development of annual transition goals. The purpose of this study was to test the configuration and structure of the TAGG theoretical model to ensure that the goals generated by the TAGG were valid for students who spent varying portions of their school day in general education. The study also tested the configuration and structure of the TAGG to understand whether the goals it generates were suitable for students at different grade levels, having exposure to different transition education concepts, and in different disability categories. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess for measurement invariance of the TAGG items on the Professional, Family and Student versions of the TAGG. Configural equivalence was found for each version of the TAGG regardless of students’ participation in general education, access to transition education, grade level, and disability category, meaning those variables do not need to be considered when goals are generated by the TAGG. Some metric invariance was observed on the student TAGG for students having had transition education and on the family TAGG for students in the 9th grade and having specific learning disabilities and intellectual disabilities, suggesting that students and families viewed some of the behaviors as less related to success than for other groups of students.