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Components of a Professional Evaluation Report, Research Paper Example

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Assessment is one of the most important instruments for a special needs educator, as it allows to define strength and needs of the classroom, and of each student in that classroom. In order to apply this instrument effectively, a teacher has to understand the purposes of assessment, and its place in educational process, be aware of the strength and limitations of assessment as an instrument, and possess knowledge about the range of assessment techniques applied in special needs education. This portfolio incorporates course information about assessment that is crucial for a special needs educator.

Introduction to assessment

Assessment should be approached with full understanding of the values and limitations of these instruments, its purposes and the role of assessment in educational process. Chosen text reflects the key points that should be addressed in forming these understanding, and explains the approach an educator may use when getting familiar with assessment

Importance of Assessment
Purpose of Assessments
The difference between testing and Assessments
Roles of education and Professionals in the Special Education Process
Assessment and federal laws
Understanding Assessment in the Special Education Process
Autism, Deaf- Blindness, Development Delay, Emotional Disturbance, Hearing Impairments, Mental Retardation, Multiple Disabilities, Orthopedic Impairment, other Health Impairment, Specific Learning Disability, Speech or Language Impairment, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Visual Impairment

I, as a new educator for Special Education students would get a good understanding of the different types of disabilities; to learn the side effects to get myself familiar with the different types of children that might be place under my care. I would review the different laws and make sure that I follow them in the classroom and out of the classroom to the best of my ability. I would get myself well familiar with the different types of assessments and different teaching styles to teach each special needs child in the way that is best for them to learn. I will make sure that I show as much affection to these types of children’s so they feel they are safe with you and feel loved by you as their teacher. I feel as an educator I should get myself prepared to work as a team with different people dealing with special needs students; there are so many people that play a part in these student lives.

Technical prerequisites of understanding assessment

Educator should understand the scores of the test held by members of the multidisciplinary team; therefore, she should have knowledge about the basic statistic terminology. These slides illustrate the basic statistics concepts.

Types of assessment

The chosen text is a list of types of assessment, and the slides provide information about the types of assessment. Each student’s performance should be assessed with a specific set of tests, which allows defining her personal strength and learning needs. Knowledge about the structure, values and limitations of each test can help the educator make a right choice about the type of the assessment needed.

Norm- Referenced testing
Criterion- Referenced test
Ecological Assessment
Curriculum-Based Assessment and Curriculum-Based Measurement
Portfolio Assessment
Authentic Assessment
Outcome-Based Assessment
Learning Styles Assessment
Primary Areas Assessment
Intelligence
Language
Perceptual Abilities, Visual-Perceptual Ability, Auditory-Perceptual Ability, Perceptual-Motor Ability
Academic Achievement
Behavior and Emotional and social Development

Informal assessment of students

Informal assessment is a set of techniques that can be incorporated into the classroom without interfering with instructional time. They are not intended to provide a result that can be compared to that of other students. Listed are the types of informal assessment, added is chart outlining four specific examples of informal assessment: DIBLES, homework, STAR Reading, and Precision Teaching. The chart provides the use or characteristics of each type of assessment, strengths and weaknesses, structure, reliability, validity, and scoring.

Outcome-Based Assessment
Learning Styles Assessment
Primary Areas Assessment
Ecological Assessment
Curriculum-Based Assessment and Curriculum-Based Measurement
Portfolio Assessment
Authentic Assessment
Criterion-referenced Test

Dynamic Indicators of Early

Literacy Skills (DIBLES)

Homework

Assessments

STAR

Reading

Characteristics/

Use

-DIBLES is a Curriculum Based Assessment (CBA).

-Informal assessment designed to identify literacy skills difficulties and provide teachers with information to reduce the risk of reading problems.

– Target grade levels : Pre-K; kindergarten; first;

Second and second grade.

Informal testing is a common assessment utilized by teachers to identify the challenges children experience in their capacity to learn. Children with such challenges display a deviant behavior when it comes to their studies. Once the challenge has been diagnosed, the teacher can be proactive in developing a solution.

-STAR Reading is a computer-adaptive assessment of general reading achievement and comprehension that can be administered to individuals or groups of students in grades 1 to 12 in approximately 10 minutes.

-The tool provides information on student performance in reading. The difficulty of items is adjusted automatically to reflect the skill level of all students, including students with special needs.

Strengths

Easy to administer: Series of tasks each measurable in one minute.

Predicts future reading problems associated with reading fluency.

Informal assessments strengths are they can be used as aids to teachers that provide a good idea of the level of learning and understanding that are attained by the students writing samples. Informal assessments give the teacher a good gauge of what the students are taught. IA (informal assessment) will also give the teachers, parents, and students the advantage of knowing how to compare the peers (i.e. students their own age, gender, or grade level). It will also give the teacher an idea of what might need to be re-taught, or reviewed. Homework can be used as a form of informal assessment because it provides a chance for the students to exercise their knowledge of the lesson that was taught that same day. A debate is another form of informal assessments that can be used within the classroom. It will help the teacher to see what type of progress and achievement students are making orally.

-STAR Reading takes approximately 10 minutes to administer.

-Scoring is automated and does not require any additional time.

-The number of alternate forms is practically unlimited because it is a computer-adaptive assessment.

Weaknesses

-Sometimes used as a high-stakes test: i.e., Kindergarteners may fail promotion to 1^st grade based on failing DIBLES scores.

-Fail to assess reading comprehension.

-Curriculum associated with the fluency assessments is costly and time consuming.

The weakness of informal assessment when it comes to homework is the form of assessment falls in the unreliability of the student. When student use their books and other form of aids to help with homework it is not coming from what they remember. Debate will make it hard for teacher to grade. It will make it hard for a teacher to come to a clear conclusion of each student’s performance.

-Some teachers find the results to be inaccurate.

-It is a timed test, which is difficult for some students and places unnecessary pressure on them.

-Some students purposely answer incorrectly to lower their score.

Structure

Structured– involves protocol and precision scoring.

Unstructured– due to we not knowing if the students are doing the homework on their own.(students using books and media)

Structured– involves protocol and precision scoring.

Reliability

High Inter-rater reliability

Reliability, in its purest logic, refers to the ability of a measure to differentiate levels of proficiency among persons who take it. This is proficient through the consistent application of scoring criteria. As with validity, the reliability of informal measures can be established by a clear description of the expectations for student performance in the curriculum and ensuring that teachers apply consistent criteria based on those expectations. If the informal measures accurately represent students’ progress, and if they accurately tell between the discrepancy progress made by individual students.

There are three direct methods that can be used to estimate the reliability of the STAR

Reading computerized-adaptive test: the split-half method, the test-retest method, and the estimation of generic reliability.

Validity

High Construct Content and Predictive Validity in fluency.

The DIBLES demonstrates an accumulation of correlations from numerous studies using a large population sample and similar testing results instruments which measure fluency.

The validity of informal assessments can be established by representing that the information obtained from a given method reflects the project’s instructional goals and objectives. If, for example, the project is teaching unrestrained writing, a collection of y scored writing samples would be a valid measure. Therefore, a first step toward validating the use of informal assessment events is a clear statement of curricular opportunity in terms of goals and objectives.

Research conducted during the development of STAR Reading confirms that the test is reliable, valid, and correlates highly with high-stakes standardized reading tests.

Scoring

Standardized administration & scoring

Simultaneous administration and scoring.

Fluency measures

The evaluation of students’ written work or mathematical computations. Scoring is based on a criterion that describes the process or continuum of learning procedures that reflect understanding of the skill or concept being assessed. At least six problems or written assignments are gathered and evaluated to ensure that a student’s error is not due to not remembering information at hand.

-Norm-referenced scaled scores, grade equivalent scores, percentile ranks, and normal curve equivalent scores are available. Scores indicating instructional learning level and zone of proximal development are also available. Reports generated automatically by STAR Reading can include all of these scores.

-Vertical scaling allows students’ progress to be monitored across grades rather than just within a grade, and a student’s most recent performance can be compared with the results of previous assessments in order to monitor progress. STAR Reading provides data that teachers can use to determine relative growth and absolute growth, and the technical manual explains the difference between the two. Scaled scores can be graphed to show a growth curve.

Intelligence assessment and litigation

Intelligence assessment has long been a mean of discrimination. Nowadays the concept prevails that intelligence is a measure of intellectual functioning and adaptive behavior one can demonstrate. Accurate perception of intelligence assessment allows the educator to use the results of this type of measurement in order to help the student to actualize her potential. These slides provide basic information about intelligence assessment and relative litigations.

The intelligence testing movement commenced around the turn of the 20^th At that time mental retardation was referred to in what we now term as adaptive behaviour.
1n 1983 Grossman referred to adaptive behaviour as ‘ the quality of everyday performance in coping with environmental demands’.
Broad consensus exists that the basic features of mental retardation involves significant limitation in the core dimensions of intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour. The greatest variations occur in the legal definition and terminology for classification.

“The most important criterion in diagnosing a child with a learning disability is through the use of an IQ test. The aim is to measure the intelligence of the student which is supposedly the potential of the child.” (Strydom & Du Plessis, 2010). IQ testing began in France when psychologists wanted to differentiate between children who were supposedly normal and those who were considered inferior. This was to avoid the disruption of the normal children. “Intelligence is a fixed quantity that cannot be changed or increased.” (Strydom & Du Plessis, 2010).

Interpreting assessment for educational intervention

An educator should be aware of the practical implication of assessment results. This fragment explains the influence of assessment results on the students’ academic lives. It emphasizes the importance of accurate assessment and unbiased interpreting of its results.

Assessment is tool that is used through the educational process in order to define the student’s learning needs and strengths (Pierangelo and Guiliani 3). Assessment in special needs education is applied in order to define whether the disability is present and define the type of the disability. Accurate assessment presents valid results that allow the special needs educator to decide about the educational services the student should receive. Contemporary classroom is characterized by the increased levels of diversity in students’ family backgrounds, ethnicities, languages spoken, educational levels etc (Salvia, Ysseldyke, and Bolt 3). Children that come to the classroom are different, with their specific strength and needs, and they need individual attention in order to help them achieve the best results they are capable of. Assessment is a valuable instrument that helps to define these strength and needs, and, therefore, allows to make informed decisions about educational settings and strategies suitable for every student. Salvia, Ysseldyke, and Bolt state that there are three domains in which the students’ competence and progress are measured: academic, behavioral and physical (4). Assessing the student’s progress in these three areas allows to get a comprehensive picture of her personal development.

Only systematic and comprehensive assessment of students performance in different domains may give enough information for making a decision considering the necessity of special educational services. Incorrect assessment results may lead to wrong decisions about the needs of the student in question. An important concern about assessment is that it grants student a label – ether “disabled” or “exceptional”, which makes the learner’s parents, teachers and friends treat him in accordance with it. Moreover, the disability label often leads to diminished self-esteem (Salvia, Ysseldyke, and Bolt 14-15).

Assessment is an instrument that has its strength and limitations. The significance of accurate assessment and interpretation cannot be overestimated, as assessment results influence students’ lives to a serious extent. Knowledge about different assessment types and techniques is crucial for the special needs educator, as it allows choosing the most appropriate techniques in order to define students’ strengths and needs in the educational process. This course provides knowledge about different aspects of assessment, as it is obvious from the portfolio.