Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students with Disabilities

AGENCY/ORGANIZATION:
OSEP

The U.S. Department of Education strives to expand educational opportunities and to improve instruction for all students. To achieve excellence in education for students with disabilities, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings launched an initiative focused on improving teaching, learning, and assessing by increasing states’ capacity to provide rigorous assessment, instruction, and accountability for these students. The keys to this effort are instruction and assessment, relying on the most current and accurate information on how students with disabilities learn while also measuring student performance to ensure continuous growth and progress.

Student achievement is front and center in all our efforts. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), and the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) are collaborating and linking their programs together to support states’ efforts to improve instruction and assessment of all students with disabilities.

To support this initiative, the Department has developed a Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students with Disabilities (Tool Kit), which offers a compilation of information that will move states forward in improving results for all students with disabilities.

The Tool Kit includes information about the Department’s investments, papers on large-scale assessment, technical assistance (TA) products, and resources. The section on large-scale assessment includes a collection of seven papers and a glossary that address key issues related to the participation of students with disabilities in these standards-based assessments. The TA products are divided into four substantive areas: Assessment, Instructional Practices, Behavior, and Accommodations.

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