What is Transition Assessment?

“Transition assessment is an ongoing process of collecting information on the student’s strengths, needs, preferences, and interests as they relate to the demands of current and future living, learning, and working environments. This process begins at age 14 or earlier and will continue until the student graduates or exits high school. Information from this process is used to drive the IEP and transition planning process and to help develop the Summary of Performance (SoP) document detailing the student’s academic and functional performance and postsecondary goals.” (adapted from: Sitlington, P. L., Neubert, D. A., Begun, W. H., Lombard, R. C., & Leconte, P. J. (2007). Assess for success: A practitioner’s handbook on transition assessment (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. p. 2-3)

Transition Assessment will Answer these Three Questions

Where is the student presently?

Where is the student going?

How will you get there?

If the three questions above cannot be answered with the transition assessments being used, then information must continue to be collected until a strong knowledge of the student’s preferences, interests, needs and strengths are obtained to create a meaningful postsecondary transition plan.

Transition assessment begins well before the IEP team meeting to ensure meaningful, high quality information is available for the IEP team to consider. These assessments can be formal or informal.

Formal assessments generally are more standardized or paper/pencil type assessments. Some examples of this are intelligence tests or aptitude surveys. Often these types of assessments are given by a professional with a license or certification to administer this type of assessment.

Informal assessments are not standardized and do not require specialization to use and are often free. There is more subjectivity in this process and best used for ongoing assessment. As you can see in the following chart, informal assessments offer a lot of variety and creativity to meet the needs of the student.

In rare cases, the student will be unable or unwilling to discuss their own, preferences, interests, needs or strengths. In these instances, age-appropriate transition assessments may be based on educator observations, input from the student’s family, or information contained in the student’s records or through the Discovery Process.

Using Transition Results

“Transition assessment is an essential process to identify student’s individualized postsecondary goals, determine necessary transition services to strive for such goals during the transition period and lead the IEP team in making sound instructional decisions.” (Rowe et al. 2015)

As defined, transition assessment is ongoing, so it is more than “one” assessment, it is a process and is interconnected with other educational assessments, family input and the student’s connections outside of school. One of the important school connections is to the Academic and Career Planning (ACP) process. Transition assessment results and the ACP together build strong foundations for individualized and relevant transition planning.

Transition Assessment

IEP, PTP and Academic and Career Planning (ACP)

As transition assessment is being discussed at the IEP meeting there is a question in the PTP that addresses if the IEP team has reviewed information from the student’s Academic and Career Plan or ACP. The ACP may be helpful and should be reviewed as part of the postsecondary transition planning process. All students will have an ACP starting in the 6th grade (most students will have this in place prior to their first transition plan) and at the age of 14, these two plans will work together. In fact, a robust ACP can fulfill many of the transition services identified in the student’s PTP. The assessments that are being completed during this ACP process should be considered valuable information to share at the transition IEP meetings, however, they are not the only assessments to consider in developing the student’s PTP. These processes link, enhance and inform each other! Finding links between the two can create environments where all students graduate college, career and community ready!