Choose and Take Action: Finding the Right Job for You
A Vocational Assessment Software Program for
Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities
Reference Citation
Martin, J. E., Marshall, L. H., L., Wray, D., Wells, L., O’Brien, J., Olvey, G., & Johnson, Z.
(2004). Choose and take action: Finding the right job for you. Longmont, CO: Sopris
West.
ChoiceMaker Curriculum Objectives
Choose and Take Action enables students to attain these ChoiceMaker Curriculum objectives:
Objective A2. Express employment interests.
Objective C2. Indicate options and choose employment goals.
Description
The Choose and Take Action program combines interactive software, classroom lessons, and
community experiences that enable individuals with mental retardation and other moderate to
severe disabilities to make practical career choices. Students watch video segments, select a job
that matches their interests, perform the selected job at a community site, evaluate the
experience, and then make new choices based on what they learned. The Choose and Take
Action instructional activities are designed to teach students numerous self-determination skills,
including:
• Choosing from a variety of work options
• Planning whether they want to watch or do the activity
• Completing the plan in the community setting
• Evaluating what they liked and did not like about the setting, activity, and work-site
characteristics, and how the students did while they were at the setting
• Using the information gained in the experience to make the next choice
The Choose and Take Action software also introduces students to a variety of job and career
possibilities while teaching them to identify what is most important to them about a job: the
setting, the activity, or the characteristics.
Settings
Activities
Characteristics
auto dealer / mechanic
assemble & disassemble
spacious
construction site
bag items & bring in carts
cozy space
factory
bus tables
noisy
florist/greenhouse/ nursery
care for animals
quiet
grocery store
care for people
inside
hospital / nursing home
care for plants
outside
hotel
heavy cleaning
wear own clothes
janitorial service
laundry
wear a uniform
landscape / outdoor maintenance
light cleaning
many people
office
move materials
few people
restaurant
filing
messy
retail
paper work
clean
school / child care
stock shelves
vet office / kennel / grooming
wash dishes
yard work
Target Population. Choose and Take Action is designed for students and adults with development
disabilities, brain injury, and autism who are unable to read and write. The characteristics of
students for whom this program will work the best include:
• Students with moderate to significant cognitive needs
• Students having difficulties getting information from print
• Students who can attend to a computer screen
• Students who can follow simple verbal instructions
• Students in middle and high school
• Students with limited work experience
Development. The development of the Choose and Take Action software program involved
numerous steps. First, a group of teachers, adult-service-supported-employment personnel,
former students with disabilities, parents, advocates for students with disabilities, and university
faculty met to brainstorm. The group identified critical self-determination skills. Next, a project
advisory panel (made up of transition specialists, teachers, former students, parents, agency and
university personnel, and school administrators) voted on the relative importance of each skill
area. Third, the development team, along with representatives from three states, spent several
days creating a rough draft of the software specifications and functions. Fourth, the advisory
panel reviewed and finalized the software plan. Fifth, the software plan underwent a nationwide
social validation process. Experts in transition, self-determination, employment for individuals
with disabilities, individuals with disabilities, and parents reviewed the plan. Then, comments
and suggestions were incorporated into the software and lessons. Sixth, the software and lessons
underwent extensive field-testing in four states, with their findings incorporated into the final
product.
The Choose and Take Action Cycle. The Choose and Take Action cycle includes four steps.
Students complete the first two cycle steps, choice making and plan development, in one session.
Step 1: Choice Making. During choice making, students view pairs of randomly
presented videos showing different employment settings, activities, and job
characteristics (see Figure 22). From each pair, students select the one they like the
best. After they have viewed all the videos once, the ones they chose the first time are
paired and the students choose again. This continues until students choose one final
video option to try. Then, students develop a plan.
Step 2: Plan. During the planning part of the program, students determine if they
want to watch someone do the activity at their selected setting or if they actually want
to do the activity. Printed plans are produced and shown with pictures that the
students chose: the setting, activity, two characteristics, and whether they want to
watch or do the activities. The evaluation questions regarding these choices are also
printed on the plan.
Step 3: Try It. Based on the plan, the student goes into the community to “try it” at the
chosen setting. Students will interact with the workers at the site as much as possible
as they watch or do the activity.
Step 4: Evaluate and Adjust. Students, with the instructor’s guidance, evaluate the
experience, then enter that information into the computer. Students then choose again
based on what they learned about their interests.
With each step, the teacher provides only instruction that the students require to complete the
step independently. Of course, an educator will need to arrange and coordinate the details
involved in visiting a ”try-it” site. The Choose and Take Action software is designed for students
with limited work experience; therefore, it is critical for students to complete the process a
number of times in order to try many different things.
Video clips. The software contains 31, 20-second video clips, across 14 employment settings and
15 activities. Twelve characteristics, each shown at least four times, are also included in the 31
video clips. Each video clip shows an employment setting, an entry-level activity, and two
characteristics of the job. For each setting, there are two or three video clips showing different
activities, and each activity shown in at least two settings.
The teacher may limit the number of video clips that a student sees in a session. Settings and
activities shown in the video clips represent entry-level jobs and include most job categories in
the Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook. The jobs represent opportunities
that are available in most communities.
Importance of Try-It. Students in the target population may have difficulty generalizing from
what is depicted in the video to a real setting. The videos give more information than a text or
pictured version of an employment interest inventory, but they still do not exactly replicate
community settings students visit. Students must go to the settings and try it to make their
choices meaningful.
Reports. The software records students’ choices throughout the program and creates reports
indicating students’ choices in the choose, plan, and evaluate sections. There is also a place for
instructors to record their observations and notes about the students’ experiences and their
discussions. The software will graph the results on simple bar graphs (see Figure 23). Reports
and graphs will help students and IEP teams to witness students’ emerging interests and skill
trends. These reports, including the instructor’s evaluations and observations, may be included in
a student portfolio. This provides information about students’ preferences for IEP meetings and
vocational assessments. This will give students a starting place for employment decision-making.
Research Documenting Effectiveness
Martin, Flexer, Daviso, Ackerman, Sale, Sylvester, and Izzo (2003) found that the choices
students made using the Choose and Take Action program correlate highly with the results of
the Becker Reading Free Interest Inventory. They also discovered that student chosen job
characteristics, tasks, and setting preferences did not match their caretakers’ choices.
Martin, Woods, Sylvester, and Gardner (2005) wanted to determine if vocational choices made
by participants with moderate to severe cognitive and physical disabilities matched vocational
choices made on their behalf by their caregivers or support staff. Eight individuals with severe
disabilities and 11 caregivers participated in the study. The job-seeking participants had limited
to no previous community work experience. Caregiver and support staff ranked the top three
settings, characteristics and activities for the job seekers. Using the Choose and Take Action
vocational assessment software, job seekers indicated their own setting, characteristics, and
activities choices. Martin et al. then compared job seekers’ choices to those made by their
caregivers. The comparison between the setting, activity, and characteristic choices that
caregivers believed individuals with disabilities wanted versus what individuals themselves
chose produced two major findings. First, support staff, parents, and teachers matched any of the
top three setting, activity, and characteristic choices made by the job-seeking individuals with
disabilities less than a third of the time. Second, top ranked caregiver activity and characteristic
selections never matched the top ranked choices made by individuals with disabilities, and the
setting choices only matched twice for an 18% agreement. These results strongly indicate that
when given the opportunity to make a real choice and act upon that choice by trying the job in
the community, individuals with severe disabilities who used the Choose and Take Action
software program clearly expressed their choices in ways unknown to their closest caregivers.
These informed choices seldom matched those made by their caregivers, even though the
caregivers in this study all believed that they knew what the individual they cared for wanted in a
job.
References
Martin, J. E., Flexer, R., Daviso, A., Ackerman, G., Sale, P., Sylvester, L., & Izzo, M. (2003).
Vocational choicemaking for students with severe disabilities. Presentation at the 12th
International DCDT Conference, Roanoke, VA.
Martin, J. E., Woods, L. L., Sylvester, L., & Gardner, J. E. (2005). A challenge to selfdetermination: Disagreement between the vocational choices made by individuals with
severe disabilities and their caregivers. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe
Disabilities, 30, 147-153.