Assessment

Page Purpose: A showcase of current international & NZ assessment practice thinking for students with special learning needs
 * Assessment of Children with Special Needs **

Narrative Assessment: identity and equity for disabled students
A short paper by Geoff Moore, Sue Molloy, Missy Morton, Keryn Davis that discusses Narrative Assessment toc =IEPOnline= An informative page on what good assessment practice is for students with special needs. =Education Counts= Research into international trends for supporting students with special education needs was recently published on Education Counts. One of the chapters discusses trends in assessment. Here is a section that identifies a range of ways of approaching assessment of learners who traditionally don't show up as being successful in the more common testing methods used in our classrooms. Accommodating and Modifying The assessment discussion below aligns with the work we did earlier this year around changing our teaching practices through **accommodating** students or **modifying** tasks so students could be included in the classroom programmes, the aim of the NZ govt's focus on inclusive education. This section uses that thinking and applies it to assessment practices. There are some useful guidelines to apply when creating assessment tasks. Sorry to red pen the key messages for you. It took me a couple of reads to get these into my head and i thought some of you may have similarly functioning senior brains. ==Chapter 9: Assessment== ===** 9.3 Some Definitions of Assessment Accommodations and Alternate Assessments ** === Basically, there are two types of adjustments to nation- or state-wide assessments. **// Assessments with accommodations //.** This involves **making changes to the assessment process, but not the essential content **. Braden et al. (2001) described accommodations as **alterations to the setting, timing, administration and types of responses ** in assessments. Here, **assessors need to distinguish between accommodations necessary for students to access or express the intended learning content and the content itself.** **// Alternate assessments. //** As defined by the US Department of Education (2003), **alternate assessments** are defined as assessments ‘designed for the small number of students with disabilities who are unable to participate in the regular State assessment, even with appropriate accommodations’ (p.68699). **They refer to materials collected under several circumstances, including: teacher observations, samples of students’ work produced during regular classroom instruction, and standardised performance tasks. ** Further, alternate assessments should have: Quenemoen et al. (2003) provided more detailed definitions and examples of the following alternate assessment approaches: > **// Portfolio: //** a collection of student work gathered to demonstrate student performance on specific skills and knowledge, generally linked to state content standards. Portfolio contents are individualized and may include **wide ranging samples of student learning, including but not limited to actual student work**, **observations recorded by multiple persons on multiple occasions, test results, record reviews, or even video or audio records of student performance… ** > // **IEP-Linked Body of Evidence**: // Similar to a portfolio approach, this is a collection of student work demonstrating student achievement on standards-based IEP goals and objectives measured against predetermined scoring criteria…This evidence may meet dual purposes of documentation of IEP progress and the purpose of assessment. > **// Performance Assessment: //** Direct measures of student skills or knowledge, usually in a one-on-one assessment. These can be highly structured, requiring a teacher or test administrator to give students specific items or tasks similar to pencil/paper traditional tests, or it can be a more flexible item or task that can be adjusted based on student needs. **For example, the teacher and the student may work through an assessment that uses manipulatives and the teacher observes whether the student is able to perform the assigned tasks…. ** > **// Checklist: //** Lists of skills, reviewed by persons familiar with a student who observe or recall whether students are able to perform the skills and to what level. Scores reported are usually the number of skills that the student is able to successfully perform, and the settings and purposes where the skill was performed. > // T**raditional (pencil/paper or computer) test:** // Traditionally constructed items requiring student responses, typically with a correct and incorrect forced-choice answer format. These can be completed independently by groups of students with teacher supervision, **or they can be administered in one-on-one assessment with teacher recording of answers **. For useful descriptions of alternate assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities, see Perner (2007), who gave examples of various States’ methods, such as portfolio and performance-based assessments referred to above.
 * **a clearly defined structure, **
 * **<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.499999046325684px; vertical-align: baseline;">guidelines for which students may participate, **
 * **<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.499999046325684px; vertical-align: baseline;">clearly defined scoring criteria and procedures, **
 * **<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.499999046325684px; vertical-align: baseline;">a report format that clearly communicates student performance in terms of the academic achievement standards defined by the State, and **
 * **<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12.499999046325684px; vertical-align: baseline;">high technical quality, including validity, reliability, accessibility, objectivity, which apply, as well, to regular State assessments. **