Individualizing Family Involvement in School Transitions: Gathering Information and Choosing the Next Program

Two Transition Planners, containing rating scales and open-ended questions, were developed to assist parents in planning their child's transition to elementary school. Parents of children beginning their final preschool year rated the importance of items to identify family and child transition-related needs, levels of family involvement in transition planning, and areas of both family and school responsibility. Rated very important were the parents' opportunities to participate in planning and selecting the next program and their receiving descriptions of potential programs. Parents also agreed on the importance of several teacher characteristics. Open-ended questions revealed individual differences among parents, such as specific skills that parents wanted children to work on prior to transition and ways in which schools could make the transition easier for the family.