ImaYDiT - Imagining young disabled people's transitions in a time of major societal change: Research project report

ImaYDiT was funded by DRILL – Disability Research for Independent Living and Learning. This is supported by the Big Lottery Fund. WiltsCIL staff, members of WiltsCIL CoproductionGroup and researchers at UWE came up with the original idea for this project. We wanted to support young disabled people to explore and re-imagine their adult lives and have the best future. This involved taking an ‘assets-based’ approach. This is where we focus on what people can do- rather than what they can’t do – which is a ‘deficit approach’. We also thought that there is not enough research about the whole of young disabled people’s lives. Instead a lot of research only concentrates on transitions through the benefits and service system.Wiltshire Social Services and the Wiltshire Parent Council helped steer the project because, where we could, we also wanted to put young disabled people’s hopes and dreams into action.We want to understand how this group of young disabled people can be supported to become the next generation who are aware of their rights, with ambitions for their futures and able to establish meaningful and independent adult lives

Does school average achievement explain the effect of socioeconomic status on math and reading interest? A test of the Information Distortion Model

Based on the Information Distortion Model (IDM), we hypothesized higher academic interest among low socioeconomic (SES) Australian children compared to equally able high SES Australian children. We extend the IDM in two ways. First, the IDM is a model of school selection and thus empirical evidence of its effect needs to come from a model that controls for achievement prior to school selection. Second, the mechanism of the IDM is presumed to be the big-fish-little-pond-effect (BFLPE), which has not been tested. We used a longitudinal representative sample of first-year high-school students (age ~12, N = 2507). We linked student high-school survey data to the whole of school and individual student administrative records of achievement from high-stakes national standardized tests in elementary and high-school. Our results were consistent with IDM for math interest but more mixed for reading interest, suggesting that additional processes may be in operation