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Validating Assessments for Students With Disabilities

Validity

States and school districts have a responsibility to educate students with disabilities. Part of this responsibility is validating the interpretations and uses of the students' test scores. This validation process needs to be comprehensive and include all components of the assessment system: the development of items and tasks, the training of teachers on implementation, the scoring and reporting procedures, and any number of statistical analyses that need to be conducted on the outcomes. In the end, the validation process focuses on the interpretation of the assessment results for making accountability decisions. The validation process is described here from an ideal perspective, with the understanding of the reality that all states and school districts have limited resources for validation.

What Does Validity Address and How Is It Operationalized?

Validity offers a way to reason about a desired interpretation of test scores and their subsequent use. The process followed to make valid interpretations and uses of test scores, validation, is used to answer two important questions:

1. How valid is an interpretation of a set of test scores?
2. How valid is the use of this set of test scores in an accountability system?

The questions are the same for all students, although the focus of this paper is on validation of assessments designed to be used in a state or school district with students who have disabilities.

The process of validation involves four stages: (a) defining what students learn, (b) stating the validity argument, (c) making the claim for validity, and (d) gathering evidence to support the argument and claim. In the final stage of the validation process, a qualified evaluator considers the logic of the argument and its plausibility, the claim, and the evidence in support of the claim. A summative judgment is made and recommendations are usually made for improving the testing program to strengthen supporting evidence and eliminate the threats to validity uncovered through the gathering of evidence.