Moving Toward Participation-Focused Goals for Students With Disabilities: Outcomes of a Knowledge Translation Program for School-Based Therapists

Background Participation in meaningful school activities is a key outcome of interventions in allied health. Although participation-focused approaches exist, their integration into school-based practice remains limited. Goal formulation is central to individualized education plans (IEPs), which often emphasize skills or impairments rather than participation in activities. This study aimed to examine changes in goals set by school-based therapists and students with disabilities following a participation-focused knowledge translation (KT) programme. Methods School-based therapists (n = 101) completed a 30-h, eight-session, 15-week training on participation. In the first session (T1), therapists provided an example of one or more IEP goals for one student on their caseload (n = 135). In the fifth session (T2), therapists set a new goal for the same student (n = 95). Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) with therapist as a random intercept were used to compare goals against seven participation-focused criteria across the two time points. Goals were also categorized into participation domains and descriptively compared across time points. Results Significant changes in goal formulation were observed across all seven criteria (p < 0.001) from T1 to T2: The estimated probability of a goal being activity-focused increased from 56% to 96%, situated in real-life settings from 55% to 95% and addressing attendance from 17% to 74%, involvement from 14% to 45%, social context from 54% to 91% and opportunity to choose from 46% to 84%. The probability of a goal targeting skills or body functions decreased from 38% to 5%. Although formal education remained a dominant domain, more goals addressed social participation (76.8% vs. 32.8%), play (41.0% vs. 20.3%) and leisure (24.2% vs. 7.4%). Conclusions Goals formulated during the KT programme expanded beyond academics to include play, leisure and social participation. Further implementation studies are needed to ensure the change is sustained beyond the training period.