Despite decades of advocacy, students with disabilities often face significant gaps in educational outcomes. If local educational agencies aim to turn things around for this student group, WestEd experts suggest starting with supportive, coherent and effective assessment systems.
An Aug. 14 webinar featured panelists discussing how to foster a culture of belonging and high expectation for all students by breaking down barriers between general and special education assessment and promoting effective data practices.
While each assessment tool and practice is designed for a specific purpose to answer different kinds of questions about learning, panelists noted that education leaders must consider how their entire system of assessment — from formal state exams to interim assessment or a diagnostic tool — works together to drive academic achievement.
“What we’re talking about is assessment as the process of eliciting evidence of student knowledge and skills, making sense of that evidence, and then using the information to make decisions to improve teaching and learning,” said Jessica Arnold, who partners with state and LEAs on professional learning and resource development projects that support effective use of assessments. “A coherent and effective assessment system is a matter of intentional design. It doesn’t just happen accidentally. In the field, we tend to consider each different assessment tool and practice individually. However, school and district leaders … must consider how these assessments work together.”
This is particularly true when it comes to assessments provided to students with disabilities, she continued. “Sometimes assessment tools and practices don’t offer the accessibility features that students with disabilities and all students need to accurately show what they know and can do. Another challenge can be with assessments that ask students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in ways that really don’t reflect the learning experiences that they’ve had in class and that the students haven’t had the scaffolding to translate or bridge their learning in the classroom to that assessment,” Arnold said. She added that even when assessments produce meaningful data, educators and leaders still need “the time, the capacity or the structural supports to analyze and translate data into practice.”
Addressing the issues
Fostering a culture of high expectations and inclusion for students with disabilities is the first step to improving their outcomes, according to Elizabeth Zagata, who leads the Effective Instruction priority areas for the National Center for Systemic Improvement. “Even the best assessment tools will not help if we’re not setting high expectations for what students with disabilities can achieve. We know that when expectations are low, instead of assessments helping us see what students can do, we often use that information to just confirm what we think they can do,” she said.
Improving access to general education environments is also critical to improving the accuracy of assessment.
“Students with disabilities need access to both the general education environment and grade-level standards-based instruction. And then our assessments need to connect to the general education curriculum that students are actually learning,” Zagata said. “This means making sure that our assessment tools align with the personalized instruction in students individualized education programs, or IEPs. General education leaders may pick assessments without thinking about students of disabilities and special education leaders may choose tools without connecting to the regular education curriculum. When we do that, the assessment data stays separate instead of being shared and discussed together. And this separation can cause problems that ripple through everything else we do.”
Additional recommendations can be found in a January WestEd report — Leading Inclusive, Coherent, and Effective Assessment Systems: Closing Opportunity and Outcome Gaps for Students With Disabilities.
WestEd is holding a series of 30-minute webinars from June through December featuring experts sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and build thriving communities. Catch up with CSBA’s recap of the July 31 webinar, “Reading and Writing Across the Content Areas: Helping Students Improve Comprehension in Grades K-5,” focused on disciplinary literacy and how it can be used at the elementary school level, and the Aug. 7 webinar, “Literacy Practices That Support Multilingual Student Success Across Content Areas.”
