Assessment

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Assessment

• Process of gathering information for the purpose
  of making a decision

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Special Education Assessment

• systematic process of gathering educationally
  relevant information to make legal and
  instructional decisions about the provision of
  special services.

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• Ongoing process
• Systematic
• Focuses on collection of educationally relevant
  information
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Purposefuldecisions to make

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• Assessment confused with testing (only one part
  of assessment) and diagnosis (establishes cause)
• Controversy in educational assessment
• Nature of intelligence
• Use of the medical model with students with
  exceptionalities
• Permanent verses learn to overcome

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• 1950s growth in identifying students with
  disabilities
• growth in assessment procedures
• invalid, unreliable, and untrained examiners
• discriminatory
• 1975 PL94-142 positive influence on the content
  and procedures using in the assessment of SWD
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1997 PL 105-17

• FAPE
• Due Process procedures
• Team assessment and IEP development
• Tied to federal funding
• Placed emphasis on assessment of students
  involvement in general classroom and curriculum
• State and district assessments

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Challenges

• Culturally and linguistically diverse students
• Overrepresentation

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• Inclusive educational settings..tools to assess
  students in multiple environments
• Educations held accountable
• Curriculum based assessments procedures and
  techniques to evaluate student growth in relation
  to the current classroom curriculum
• (curriculum based measurements portfolio
  assessment )

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Standards movement

• Major move in US towards outcome based model
• Used as basis for judging student performance,
  deciding school and teacher functioning
  appropriately
• Forcing fundamental changes in teaching methods
  and structure of schools

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• Important to make sure students with disabilities
  are not excluded while at the same time providing
  appropriate test accommodations and modifications
  to guarantee valid and reliable evaluation.

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Special Education Summary

• Page 8

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Purposes

• Identification
• Determination of eligibility
• Program planning
• Monitoring of student progress,
• Program evaluation

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Kinds of Strategies

• Informal
• Formal

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Formal strategies

• Structured assessment procedures with specific
  guidelines for administration, scoring, and
  interpretation of results
• Standardized test (norm-referenced tests which
  compare the performance of one individual to that
  of a normative group.)
• Group or individual administration
• Most academic subjects
• Intellectual performance
• Directions very explicit
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• Often require training
• Quantitative scores (standard scores or
  percentile ranks)
• Eligibility for special education
• ID strengths and weaknesses
• Group
• Achievement and aptitude
• Group or individual
• Skills measured separately to measure specific
  performance (e.g. decoding)
• Subtest to give very specific information (e.g.
  reasoning and memory)

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Informal Strategies

• Used in educational assessments to determine
  current levels of performance
• Document student progress
• Direct changes in the instructional program
• Less structured
• Often designed by teacher rather than commercial
  publisher
• Purpose gathers information directly related to
  instruction

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• Subjectivity and interpretation can be
  problematic
• Expressed in instructional terms
• Vary in how directly they measure student
  performance and instructional conditions
• 1.) Observation most direct information
  assessment technique
• 2.) Curriculum-based assessments typically
  designed by teachers to gather information about
  the student progress in the classroom curriculum
• (task analysis, work sample analysis)
• Criterion referenced test purpose is to compare
  students performance to a specific level of
  mastery or achievement. (e.g.

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• Norm-referenced measures compare a students
  performance to that of other students,
• Criterion referenced measures compare a students
  performance to instructional goals.
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• 3.) Techniques using informants
• Checklists
• Rating scales
• Questionnaires
• Interviews
•  4.) Combination approaches
• Portfolio collection of samples to document
  change in performance over time

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Team approach

• Evaluation of eligibility of students for special
  education and related services
• Formulation of IEP
• Evaluation and modification of IEP
• Periodic review of the need for special education
  and related services

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Possible Team Members

• General education teachers
• Special education teachers
• School administrators
• Parents and students
• School support personnel
• Medical personnel
• Social workers and counselors
• Transition specialists (page 17) 14/16
• Motor skills specialists
• other personnel

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Purpose of the Team Approach

• assemble all the information necessary for
  educational decisions making through members
  combined skills
• more objective than individual
• keep as small as possible
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Assessment Question Model

• Page 20

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