Supplemental Chapter 2 (formerly Chapter 21)
METHODS TO ASSESS CHILDREN
WITH DISABILITIES IN REGULAR
EDUCATION CLASSROOMS
In Supplemental Chapter 1 (formerly textbook Chapter 20) we discussed the implications for general education teachers of
the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA–04). It
was IDEA–97 that first required general education teachers to be members of the Individual
Educational Program (IEP) team of each child with a disability. Under IDEA–04, the IEP
team is responsible for developing the child’s IEP, which is to include the following:
• a statement of the child’s present levels of educational performance
• a statement of measurable annual goals, and
• a statement of (I) how the child’s progress toward annual goals will be measured and
(II) how the child’s parents will be regularly informed about the child’s progress.
IDEA–04 relaxed certain requirements that were included in IDEA–97. The changes
included elimination of two requirements, namely short-term objectives and informing
parents of progress as often as parents of nondisabled students are informed. However,
IDEA–04 reaffirmed that it is the IEP team that determines whether a student with a
disability takes (a) the same annual academic assessment required by the No Child Left
Behind Act (NCLB) as do nondisabled peers, (b) the assessment with accommodations, or
(c) a state-approved alternate assessment. And, if the IEP team recommends accommodations
or an alternate assessment, the IEP team must justify why this is necessary.
Congress’s intent in passing IDEA–97, IDEA–04 and NCLB is clear: Children with
disabilities must now be instructed within the general curriculum, their progress within
the general curriculum must now be assessed regularly and, except where the IEP team
can justify accommodations or an alternate assessment, all students with disabilities must
participate in the same annual academic assessment required for their nondisabled peers.
Because the general education teacher will be the professional on the IEP team most
familiar with the general curriculum and the annual academic assessment, the general
education teacher, in collaboration with the special education teacher, can expect to play
an important role in IEP team meetings. And, because the progress of children with
disabilities can often be hampered by behavioral, social, and attitudinal needs that result
from the disability, these too will have to be assessed regularly to determine whether they
impeded progress in the general curriculum, whenever called for in the IEP.
IDEA AND NCLB: ISSUES AND QUESTIONS
The IDEA and NCLB requirements we have described raise a number of important issues
and questions. Several of these are listed here:
Who will be responsible for collecting the educational, behavioral, social, and
attitudinal data that will be needed by the IEP team to determine the child’s
• current educational performance,
• progress toward annual goals,
• needs that when filled will enable the child with a disability to profit from the
general curriculum, and
• other needs that result from the child’s disability?
Who will be responsible for determining how the child’s progress toward annual
goals will be measured?
How will the child’s parents be notified about progress?
If general education teachers, as experts in the assessment of progress in the general
curriculum (e.g., through teacher-made tests and performance and portfolio
assessments) are to collect these data, how can the general education teacher find
time to do so?
When a child’s disability requires accommodations or an alternate assessment, what
kind of data can the regular classroom teacher provide to support such a decision?
If behavioral, social, and attitudinal factors related to the disability impede the
progress of a child with a disability in the general curriculum, how are general
education teachers to assess these factors?
ASSISTANCE FOR TEACHERS
Congress was aware that many of these questions and issues relate to the classroom
teacher’s skill in the assessment of children with disabilities, and to the available time to
do so. Congress recognized that general education teachers will need assistance if they
are to comply with the additional requirements of IDEA. The legislation stipulates that
additional resources are to be made available to general education teachers to facilitate
adaptation to this expanded role. For example, special education staff and related service
providers are to be increasingly available to consult with general education teachers to
facilitate instruction and assessment of children with disabilities within the general
curriculum. Additional funding is to be sought to support such efforts.
All this may sound promising to you as a general education teacher. However, there
may be substantial obstacles to the actual provision of needed support services to general
education teachers.
Most special educators and related service providers are not experts in the general
curriculum, assessment of performance and progress in the general curriculum, or your
state’s annual academic assessment that is required under NCLB. Thus even well-intended
efforts by special educators to assist general educators in the general curriculum may be
less than adequate. In addition, funding of such additional activities and resources can be
interpreted to be a local responsibility. This means that funding for additional support will
have to be found in what often are financially strapped local budgets or other, unspecified
local sources. In an era of heightened competition for limited financial resources, other
priorities may be funded first, with efforts to help general teachers comply with IDEA and
NCLB requirements left with little or no additional funding. In spite of Congress’s
recognition of the added burden IDEA places on general education teachers, expectations
for significant, consistent assistance may be unrealistic. In any case, both IDEA and
NCLB ensure that the regular teacher will play an expanded role in the assessment of the
performance and progress of children with disabilities in the general curriculum.
CAN REGULAR TEACHERS ASSESS
CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES?
We believe regular teachers can assess children with disabilities, as long as expectations
are appropriate. As a result of completing this course you will have learned many, if not
most, of the skills, tools, and techniques needed to assess the current educational performance
and progress of children with disabilities in the general curriculum, and to help
determine whether they can participate appropriately in the annual academic assessment
required by NCLB. These skills, techniques, and tools can be, sometimes with modification,
those we have already covered in this text (e.g., teacher-made objective and essay
tests, and performance and portfolio assessments).
Many of the skills, techniques, and tools that the teacher may use to collect data
for the IEP team to consider in its evaluation of the behavioral, attitudinal, and other
impediments to progress in the general curriculum are related to academic assessment
techniques. For example, to develop and use tools to assess the behavior of a child with
a disability will require skill in the specification of observable, relevant behaviors,
something you learned to do when we covered instructional objectives in Chapter 5.
Later in this chapter we will discuss tools used to assess attitudes. As you will see, tools
to assess attitudes, which are not directly observable, are constructed in much the same
way as are objective achievement test items, which we covered in Chapter 6. Because
this groundwork has been laid, you may find that assessment of pupil behavior and
attitude may be considerably less time-consuming and demanding than it would be if
you were not already skilled in the construction and use of achievement tests and
assessments.
SHOULD REGULAR TEACHERS ASSESS
CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES?
We believe regular teachers should assess children with disabilities, for two reasons. One
is that IDEA now requires this involvement. You will not have a choice. The other is that
the classroom teacher may be the only professional on the IEP team with general curriculum
expertise and specific knowledge about your state’s NCLB required academic
assessment. To evaluate the academic performance and progress of a child with a
disability in the general curriculum, the IEP team will rely largely on data gathered in the
regular classroom, which is the domain of the classroom teacher. No other professional
will be better positioned to collect and provide data on a day-to-day basis about the child
with a disability’s academic performance and progress.
Next, we will discuss more specifically the assessment of current educational
performance and progress in the general curriculum. Then, we will discuss the assessment
of behavioral and attitudinal factors that can interfere with progress in the general
curriculum, with special attention given to the assessment of children with disabilities
who take medications that can influence directly learning, behavior, and attitudes.
ASSESSING ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
AND PROGRESS
The educational performance and progress of the child with a disability in the general
curriculum may be assessed with teacher-made and standardized tests and assessments.
We will discuss each approach in turn.
Teacher-Made Tests and Assessments
Objective and essay tests and performance and portfolio assessments can all be used to
assess the performance and progress of children with disabilities in the general curriculum.
Depending on the learner’s disability, some modifications in administration and
scoring may be necessary to obtain accurate information about the learner. Some examples
of possible modifications include providing additional time to complete tests and
assessments, using stimuli with larger print or Braille, limiting distractions, or taking
more frequent breaks. Because the case of each child with a disability may be unique,
modifications appropriate for one learner may or may not be appropriate for others.
The objectives and content emphasis of teacher-made tests, including performance
assessments and portfolios, can be customized to directly assess the performance and
progress of children with disabilities in the regular curriculum. Instead of administering
identical tests and assessments to children with disabilities and nondisabled pupils,
teachers may tailor or customize the tests they develop to emphasize or address academic,
behavioral, and other issues identified in the child with a disability’s IEP. Use of teacher made
instruments for the educational assessment of children with disabilities offers the
general education teacher needed flexibility to assess children with a wide range of
disabilities. By utilizing a personal computer and the various software packages we
described in the sidebar for Chapter 6 (see Box 6-1), teachers will be able to make
accommodations in teacher-made tests and assessments appropriate to the needs of
children with disabilities much more easily than could be done without this technology.
Teacher-made tests and assessments can be customized to meet the needs of children
with disabilities far more easily and appropriately than can standardized tests and
assessments. Indeed, modifying administration and scoring procedures for standardized
tests and assessments undermines the reliability and comparability of the results. For this
reason, we expect that much of the data that the IEP team will use to regularly evaluate
the performance and progress of each child with a disability will come from teacher-made
rather than standardized tests and assessments. In the next section we will detail the
problems associated IDEA’s requirements that standardized test accommodations and
alternate assessments must be provided for children with disabilities who are not able to
participate in the same way as their nondisabled peers in annual state- and district-wide
standardized assessments required under NCLB. These requirements can seriously limit
the usefulness of the results of annual state- and district-wide assessment for children
with disabilities.
Standardized Tests and Assessments
IDEA–04 and NCLB require that all children with disabilities be included in state- and
district-wide annual assessments, with accommodations and alternate assessments
provided that are appropriate for their disabilities. NCLB also requires that the results
from these assessments be made available to the public each year.
These requirements are the result of a well-intended effort to improve accountability
for the progress of children with disabilities in the general curriculum, which in turn was
intended to result in enhanced educational outcomes for children with disabilities. Prior to
IDEA–97 and NCLB, most children with disabilities were excluded from annual stateand
district-wide assessments. That made assessment of their progress from year to year
and across different schools and programs difficult, and it made accountability for districtwide
instructional programs and IEPs difficult.
By requiring the participation of all children with disabilities in annual state- and
district-wide assessments, Congress hoped to enhance accountability by enabling
comparisons to be more easily made among children with disabilities in different classes,
schools, districts, and states, and over time. It was believed this would enable the progress
of children with disabilities to be tracked over time and across settings in the same way
that annual standardized assessments enable such comparisons for nondisabled students.
What Congress may have failed to realize, however, is that there is an important difference
between comparisons based on standardized tests and comparisons based on
nonstandardized accommodated tests and alternate assessments.
Limitations of Accommodations and Alternate
Assessments
In Chapter 18 we explained that standardized administration and scoring procedures were
necessary to reduce error and thereby enhance reliability. Standardized administration and
scoring also enable comparisons among different schools, districts, states, and learners by
ensuring that all test takers are evaluated under the same uniform administration conditions
and that scoring procedures were followed for the norm group. Yet, both IDEA and
NCLB allow modification of the very standardized procedures that are necessary to
enable such comparisons to be made. Does this seem contradictory? Can standardized
assessments be standardized if they are customized rather than uniform? The answer, of
course, is no. Making accommodations in administration or scoring on state- or districtwide
assessments or administering alternate assessments will affect test reliability and
validity in unknown ways and will compromise comparability of scores.
For some children with disabilities the effects of such accommodations or administering
alternate assessments may be minimal, and for others they may be large. In the
absence of systematic study of the actual effects of accommodations for disabilities it will