Models for Large-Scale Assessment for Students with Disabilities

Both the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) require states to provide students with disabilities access to the general education curriculum and to hold schools accountable for the academic achievement of all students. This executive summary highlights the core findings and recommendations of Including Students With Disabilities in Large-scale Assessment (Technical Work Group, 2006), a set of papers commissioned by the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education.

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

Validating assessments for students with disabilities can be challenging. If test scores derived from those assessments are used for state accountability purposes, threats to validity must be identified and actions taken to remove or reduce those threats. However, by changing the mode of presentation—for example, using a larger font—the effect of the vision impairment is removed, thus providing the student a fairer opportunity to perform. 

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

This paper discusses assessment reliability with emphasis on the benefits of careful assessment design and administration when used for measuring students with disabilities. 

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

In this resource, we seek answers to two important questions. Whether the students tested have disabilities or not, the questions are identical: (1) How valid is our interpretation of a student's test score? and (2) How valid is it to use these scores in an accountability system to make judgments about students’ performance as it relates to a set of content standards? Validity evidence may be documented at both the item and total test levels. This paper focuses only on documentation of validity evidence at the total test level. 

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the validation process for large-scale assessments using the standards-based assessments of two states while minimizing construct-irrelevant variance or construct underrepresentation.

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

This paper provides a brief overview of some professional development principles, defines what each constituent group needs to know, and lists topics and resources for each group.

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

This resource provides definitions to key terms related to Models for Large-Scale Assessment for Students with Disabilities. 

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)

This paper focuses on issues most closely related to the participation methods. The paper discusses the learning and behavioral characteristics of students likely to be appropriate for each testing method. IEP teams also should consider whether the participation method has consequences for meeting graduation requirements. Because graduation requirements differ by state, this paper does not address implications of the various participation methods on graduation. State-level testing guidelines should specify the impact of each method on meeting graduation requirements. We begin with the premise that all students, with or without disabilities, should participate in the general assessment without accommodations unless the IEP team determines otherwise.

This resource is a part of the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students With Disabilities (2004, archived)