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