Growing pains: a personal development program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in a specialist school

Abstract

A personal development program, entitled ‘Growing Pains’, was developed for 11-to 15-year-old students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in a specialist school. Seven topics were identified as important in supporting students through the physical and emotional changes of adolescence. A single-group, non-experimental outcome evaluation was conducted on a 20 week trial program.Teacher-developed checklists of observable skills were completed pre-and post-program for 68 participants yielding individual ‘personal development’ scores and whole group ‘topic’ scores, graphed to observe pre–post differences. Parents and teachers completed feedback questionnaires. Graphed data showed positive trends in individual personal development and most topic scores.The topic ‘personal hygiene’ showed almost no change across the group but parent and teacher feedback identified it as highly important. Causality cannot be established using this design; however, positive trends justified persisting with the program. Future studies might investigate effective means of teaching personal hygiene skills.