SPECIAL EDUCATION ASSESSMENT

Special Education Assessment

Special Education Assessment

Description

It is sometimes difficult to make sense of all of the data that is collected on a child in a special education program. The first issue is consistency and standardization. There is no excepted assessment protocol that is used in ALL schools for all children, it varies immensely from school district to school district. Another issue is that the data is often not presented to the families in a meaningful way and the assessment is often not directly tied to IEP goals, so at times, it is not clear what is being assessed or why. Similarly, it is not always clear which assessments to use to get meaningful outcome data (Benson, 2009).

Purpose of Tests

Testing and assessment is ongoing with children in special education programs. Some are formal, normed and standardized. Formal tests are used to compare populations as well as evaluating individual children. Some are less formal and used for ongoing assessment of a student's progress in meeting his or her IEP goals. These can include curriculum based assessment, using chapter tests from a text, or teacher made tests, created to measure specific goals on a child's IEP.

Content

The purpose of these assessments is to determine the child's overall, verbal, or non-language intellectual ability. Skills that are typically measured include language skills, processing speed, memory, abstract thinking, planning, motor skills, spatial abilities, organization, social understanding and judgment, and common sense. IQ scores are often (but not always) associated with these assessments.

IQ scores show a child's intellectual ability compared to other children their age. IQ scores are more stable for older children than for younger children and change from childhood to adulthood. Many factors may contribute to IQ, so it is important to take them for what they are and to not make more ...