Non standardized or Informal types of Assessment: when a child is referred to the MDT, the team is required by law to do a comprehensive assessment. This involves standardized and non standardized forms of assessment. Non-standardized or informal types of assessment include: Ecological assessment basically involves directly observing and assessing the child in the many environments in which he or she routinely operates. The purpose of conducting such an assessment is to probe how the different environments influence the student and his or her school performance. Where does the student manifest difficulties? Are there places where he or she appears to function appropriately? What is expected of the student academically and behaviorally in each type of environment? What differences exist in the environments where the student manifests the greatest and the least difficulty? What implications do these differences have for instructional planning?
Direct assessment of academic skills is one alternative that has recently gained in popularity. While there are a number of direct assessment models that exist (Shapiro, 1989), they are similar in that they all suggest that assessment needs to be directly tied to instructional curriculum.
Curriculum-based assessment (CBA) is one type of direct evaluation. “Tests” of performance in this case come directly from the curriculum. For example, a child may be asked to read from his or her reading book for one minute. Information about the accuracy and the speed of reading can then be obtained and compared with other students in the class, building, or district. CBA is quick and offers specific information about how a student may differ from peers.
Because the assessment is tied to curriculum content, it allows the professional to match curriculum adaptations or modifications are needed. Unlike many other types of educational assessment, such as intelligence tests, CBA provides information that is immediately relevant to instructional programming. (Berdine & Meyer, 1987, p. 33) CBA also offers information about the accuracy and efficiency (speed) of performance. The latter is often overlooked when assessing a child’s performance but is an important piece of information when designing intervention strategies. CBA is also useful in evaluating short-term academic progress.
Dynamic assessment refers to several different, but similar approaches to evaluating student learning. The goal of this type of assessment “is to explore the nature of learning, with the objective of collecting information to bring about cognitive change and to enhance instruction” (Sewell, 1987, p. 436).
One of the chief characteristics of dynamic assessment is that it includes a dialogue or interaction between the examiner and the student. Depending on the specific dynamic assessment approach used, this interaction may include modeling the task for the student, giving the student prompts or cues as he or she tries to solve a given problem, asking what the student is thinking while working on the problem, sharing on the part of the examiner to establish the task’s relevance to experience and concepts beyond the test situation, and giving praise or encouragement (Hoy & Gregg, 1994). The interaction allows the examiner to draw conclusions about the student’s thinking processes (e.g., why he or she answers a question in a particular way) and his or her response to a learning situation (i.e., whether, with prompting, feedback, or modeling, the student can produce a correct response, and what specific means of instruction produce and maintain positive change in the student’s cognitive functioning).
Typically, dynamic assessment involves a test-train-retest approach. The examiner begins by testing the student’s ability to perform a task or solve a problem without help. Then, a similar task or problem is given the student, and the examiner models how the task or problem is solved or gives the student cues to assist his or her performance. In Feuerstein’s (1979) model of dynamic assessment, the examiner is encouraged to interact constantly with the student, an interaction that is called mediation, which is felt to maximize the probability that the student will solve the problem. Other approaches to dynamic assessment use what is called graduated prompting (Campione & Brown, 1987) where “a series of behavioral hints are used to teach the rules needed for task completion” (Hoy & Gregg, 1994, p. 151). These hints do not evolve from the student’s responses, as in Feuerstein’s model, but, rather, are scripted and preset, a standardization which allows for comparison across students. The prompts are given only if the student needs help in order to solve the problem. In both these approaches, the “teaching” phase is followed by a retesting of the student with a similar task but with no assistance from the examiner. The results indicate the student’s “gains” or responsiveness to instruction — whether he or she learned and could apply the earlier instructions of the examiner and the prior experience of solving the problem.
Portfolio Assessment: Perhaps the most important type of assessment for the classroom professional is the portfolio assessment. According to Paulson, Paulson and Meyer (1991 p.60), a portfolio is “a purposeful collection of student works that exhibits the student’s efforts, progress, and achievement in one or more areas. The collection must include student participation in selecting contents, the criteria for selection, the criteria for judging merit, and evidence of student self-reflection.” A portfolio collection contains work samples, permanent products and test results from a variety of instruments and measures. For example, a portfolio of reading might include a student’s test scores on professional made tests including curriculum based assessments, work samples from daily work and homework assignments, error analyses on work and test samples, and the results of an informal reading inventory with miscues noted and analyzed (Overton, 1996, p. 250).
Authentic Assessment: Another technique used to assess classroom performance by the professional could include the use of authentic assessment. This is a performance based assessment technique that involves the application of knowledge to real life activities, real world settings or a simulation of such a setting using real life, real world activities (Taylor, 1997). For example, when an individual is being assessed in the area of artistic ability, typically he or she present art work and is evaluated according to various criteria; it is not simply the person’s knowledge of art, the materials, artists or the history.
Outcome Based Assessment: Outcome-based assessment has been developed, at least in part, to respond to concerns that education, to be meaningful, must be directly related to what educators and parents want the child to have gained in the end. Outcome-based assessment involves considering, teaching, and evaluating the skills that are important in real-life situations. Learning such skills will result in the student becoming an effective adult. Assessment, from this point of view, starts by identifying what outcomes are desired for the student (e.g., being able to use public transportation). In steps similar to what is used with task analysis, the team then determines what competencies are necessary for the outcomes to take place (e.g., the steps or subskills the student needs to have mastered in order to achieve the outcome desired) and identifies which subskills the student has mastered and which he or she still needs to learn. The instruction that is needed can then be pinpointed and undertaken.
Task Analysis: Task analysis is very detailed; it involves breaking down a particular task into the basic sequential steps, component parts, or skills necessary to accomplish the task. The degree to which a task is broken down into steps depends upon the student in question; “it is only necessary to break the task down finely enough so that the student can succeed at each step”(Wallace, Larsen, & Elksnin, 1992, p. 14).
Taking this approach to assessment offers several advantages to the professional. For one, the process identifies what is necessary for accomplishing a particular task. It also tells the professional whether or not the student can do the task, which part or skill causes the student to falter, and the order in which skills must be taught to help the student learn to perform the task. According to Bigge (1990), task analysis is a process that can be used to guide the decisions made regarding:
- what to teach next
- where students encounter problems when they are attempting but are not able to complete a task
- the steps necessary to complete an entire task
- what adaptations can be made to help the student accomplish a task
- options for those students for whom learning a task is not a possible goal
Learning Styles Assessment: Learning styles theory suggests that students may learn and problem solve in different ways and that some ways are more natural for them than others. When they are taught or asked to perform in ways that deviate from their natural style, they are thought to learn or perform less well. A learning style assessment, then, would attempt to determine those elements that impact on a child’s learning and “ought to be an integral part of the individualized prescriptive process all special education professionals use for instructing pupils” (Berdine & Meyer, 1987, p. 27).
Some of the common elements that may be included here would be the way in which material is typically presented (visual, auditory, tactile) in the classroom, the environmental conditions of the classroom (hot, cold, noisy, light, dark), the child’s personality characteristics, the expectations for success that are held by the child and others, the response the child receives while engaging in the learning process (e.g., praise or criticism), and the type of thinking the child generally utilizes in solving problems (e.g., trial and error, analyzing). Identifying the factors that positively impact the child’s learning may be very valuable in developing effective intervention strategies.
From The Special Educator’s Survival Guide-Pierangelo (2004). Jossey Bass
