The Changing Paradigms of Special Education Assessment - Report Example

The Changing Paradigms of Special Education Assessment Special education is a system designed for with special needs. The needs in most cases can be either low incidence or high incidence caused by disabilities. According to Boser (2009), low incidence disabilities have a biological or organic foundation while high incidence disabilities have no biological foundation and thus a social system model explains them. Like the other types of education, the special education also requires assessment. The paradigm of special education assessment has been changing from time-to-time in the past years. This paper explains the changes that have been experienced in the past to yield the currently used special education assessment. In addition, it explains the overall impacts of the changes experienced on the special education assessment. Administration of special education assessment has greatly evolved in the United States. However, some aspects of special education instructions have changed very little in the past years. According to Swanson (2008), over the past years in the history of American education, students with disabilities have been receiving instructions in school settings identical to those of other students. This has exposed disabled students to conditions similar to those of other students. As a result, the same assessment method was used for both the disabled and able students. The assessment results portrayed a great inequality in the performance of the disabled students compared to that of other students. Majority of schools realized the incomparable trend revealed by the performances of the disabled students and that of normal students. As a result, they decided not to involve the disabled students in state assessments. Although this was an unfair practice, they felt that it was essential since the disabled students would not meet the required standards of the tests when allowed to take them. This resulted to several problems in the schools with cases of disabled students. According to Quenemoen (2008), the problems included increased in rate of referrals to special education, need to exclude the students from the curriculum, and lack of information on education results of the disabled students. The practice was therefore poor and discriminative since they resulted to low quality education among the disabled students. In the early times, there were no clear indications of what students should know at the end of an instruction. This is because the instruction techniques and curriculums used during this period were topic centered. Topic centered assessment tests the ability of the students to master course content instead of testing their ability to understand the concepts addressed by a topic and its applicability. As a result, teachers mainly focused on covering the content of a curriculum without minding whether the students understood it or not. This was also the case with special education assessment during the early times. The students with disabilities were tested on the ability to master concepts despite the limits they had due to their disability. This made the education standards for special education delivery and assessment low. In the past, instructors did not expect the disabled students to get information literacy similar to that of their counterparts. This made the focus of the assessments administered to special education students to differ from that of the assessments administered to other students. According to Shepard, Hannaway & Baker (2009), assessment in special education in the early times mainly focused on the minimum competencies that a student could have obtained at the end of instruction. In doing this, they failed to reveal whether students had gained the competency intended by instruction delivery. As a result, the assessments were ineffective thus resulting to a great need for improvement. Several changes have happened on the special education assessment protocols over time in the United States. One of the key changes that happened during the early revolutions is the introduction of No Child Left Behind Act introduced in 2001 (Robinowitz et al., 2008). One of the changes brought by this act was ensuring that all students are involved in state assessments despite their disabilities. The act aimed at ensuring that students with disabilities are not discriminated in the course of their education. As a result, the disabled students increased the chances of obtaining quality education similar to the one obtained by their counterparts. However, introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act came with other challenges in terms of assessment of the disabled students. The challenges were caused by the differences in academic abilities of the disabled students and that of the other students. These challenges actually called for action by education stakeholders. One of the measures undertaken to address the identified challenges was introduction of alternate assessments standards (Robinowitz et al., 2008). These standards are specially made to address the need of cognitively impaired students. Moreover, they could be applicable for students with other types of disabilities. Another measure introduced to address the challenges imposed by the No Child left Behind act was introduction of accommodation to disabled students undertaking state assessments. An example of accommodation to the disabled is reading assistance provided by an assessor to a visually impaired student. Use of oral assessment when dealing with visually and physically impaired students is another assessment method that is more accommodative of the disabled students. This has greatly improved the way assessment of disabled students is done thus making the assessment process more effective. Recently, cognitive assessment has been introduced in the assessment of special education students. These kinds of assessments are characterized by several intelligence tests. According to Holdnack (2008), this kind of assessments measure multiple and complex problem solving abilities affected by specific cognitive processes. This is an indication that the focus of the assessment of the disabled students has shifted from basic skills to complex skills. As a result, the assessments now measure the highest levels of competency developed by students during instructions. Moreover, curriculum and instruction delivery has shifted from topic centered to concept understanding centered. Changes experienced in special education assessment have had several impacts on the education provided to special education students. One of the most prevalent impacts is the enabling of large-scale assessment of the students with disabilities. This has made special students education to meet the standards similar to those of the normal students thus allowing them access quality educations. The result has been improvement on the level of competence on the special students. However, this impact is only associated with schools with a large number of disabled students since schools with a small number of them do not need to employ large-scale assessments to their disabled students. Another impact is the improvement in the quality of assessment administered to the disabled students. Schools have currently been able to shift from assessment of learning to assessment for learning. Assessment for learning is mainly done with an objective of using it to promote learning among the students. This has played a very significant role in the improvement on the levels of education provided to the disabled students. The reason for this is its ability to shape instructions provided to students to make them fit the specific students’ needs. However, this kind of learning is only effective when used at the beginning or during instructions. This is because if used at the end of an instruction process, the improvements suggested by the assessment results will have no impact to the students. In conclusion, special education assessment has experienced several changes in the past. In the early times, the assessment of students with disabilities used to be very ineffective due to various limitations that were associated with the assessment strategy used. However, in the recent past, assessment of this kind of students has greatly improved in an attempt to overcome its limitations. Some of the changes experienced in this assessment were introduction of No Child Left Behind assessment strategy, introduction of alternative assessments, and introduction of accommodation to special education students undertaking state assessments. This has greatly improved the assessment done on this type of students thus resulting to a great impact to their learning. References Boser, U. (2009). High and Low Incidence Disabilities. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Public Education. Holdnack, J. A. (2008). Defining the Role of Intellectual and Cognitive Assessment in Special Education. Retrieved from: http://www.pearsonassessments.com/hai/Images/pdf/wisciv/definingtherole.pdf. Quenemoen, R. (2008). A Brief History of Alternate Assessments Based on Alternate Achievement Standards. Retrieved from: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/NCEO/onlinepubs/Synthesis68/Synthesis68.pdf. Robinowitz, S. et al. (2008). Alternative Assessments for Special Education Students in the Southwest Region States. Retrieved from: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/southwest/pdf/REL_2008044.pdf. Shepard, L., Hannaway, J., & Baker, E. (2009). Standards, Assessments, and Accountability: Education Policy White Paper. Retrieved from: http://naeducation.org/Standards_Assessments_Accountability_White_Paper.pdf. Swanson, C. B. (2008). The State of Students with Disabilities in the Nation’s High Schools. Retrieved from: http://www.edweek.org/media/eperc_specialeducationinamerica.pdf. Read More