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Designing from the Ground Floor: Alternate Assessment on Alternate Achievement Standards

Part II: Who are the Students who take Alternate Assessments on Alternate Achievement Standards?

Purpose of Part II

As a result of Part II: Who are the Students who take Alternate Assessments on Alternate Achievement Standards, participants should be able to identify who will take alternate assessments on alternate achievement standards, begin to articulate the learning characteristics of this small segment of the population, and begin to build a theory of learning.

Trainer's Note: This presentation is designed to stand alone. Therefore, you will find elements of Part I: Overview, Terminology, Theory, and Research in this presentation.

Theoretical Foundation: The Assessment Triangle

An underlying conceptual model for the work of the National Alternate Assessment Center is the "assessment triangle", based on the work of the National Research Council's Committee on the Foundations of Assessment's (Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001). This triangle explicates the key relationships between models of student cognition, observation of student work, and the inferences we can draw from these observations about what students know. This model focuses our attention on how assessment, including large-scale educational assessments, can reflect what good teaching and learning should look like.

The assessment triangle described by Pellegrino et al. (2001) consists of: "a model of student cognition in the domain, a set of beliefs about the kinds of observations that will provide evidence of the students' competencies, and an interpretation process for making sense of the evidence" (p. 44). Pellegrino et al. defined three pillars on which every assessment must rest: "a model of how students represent knowledge and develop competence in the subject domain, tasks or situations that allow one to observe students' performance, and an interpretation method for drawing inferences from the performance evidence thus obtained" (p. 2). They suggest that these pillars make up an assessment triangle, and that this triangle—cognition, observation, interpretation—must be articulated, aligned, and coherent for inferences drawn from the assessment to have integrity. For alternate assessments on alternate achievement standards for students with significant cognitive disabilities, we suggest that a theory of learning (cognition) in academic content has not been well articulated for this population and therefore is incomplete in the assessment design process. For this reason, we feel that it is necessary to begin this discussion of the "ground floor" with the cognition vertex of the assessment triangle and articulate how we know what students with significant cognitive disabilities know and can do in the content domains of reading and mathematics. Therefore, complete documentation of who the students are who take alternate assessments on alternate achievement standards is vitally important.

Participation

Students with disabilities participate in assessment and accountability systems in three ways. Most students with disabilities participate in the general assessment with or without accommodations that are aligned to grade-level content and achievement standards. Some students with disabilities may participate in assessment through an alternate assessment that is also aligned to grade-level content and achievement standards. Finally, a few students with the most significant cognitive disabilities will participate in an alternate assessment. These assessments must be linked to the grade-level content standards but may have different definitions of proficiency (NAAC, 2004).

Student Population for Alternate Assessment on Alternate Achievement Standards

Students with the most significant cognitive disabilities represent only about 1% of the total assessed population. However the diversity of learning within this 1% is quite variable when considering assessment strategies. We find these students are more different than alike in terms of their response capabilities and may come from a variety of special education categories.

We have video taped some case study examples of each of these categories to assist participants in identifying the target population. The mental retardation category represents the largest category of students who use alternate assessments, but not all students with mental retardation will take alternate assessments. We will introduce you to Ryan and Sarah. Both Ryan and Sarah experience significant cognitive disabilities but the differences between them represent the diversity of support and response needs. Ryan and Sarah may experience difficulty with remembering new information, generalizing new information to novel situations, or applying skills to new problems.

Similarly, we find participants in alternate assessment on alternate achievement standards in the category of multiple disabilities. As with the mental retardation category, not all students with a label of multiple disability will be assessed on alternate achievement standards. We will introduce you to Rhianna, Leslie, and Martha. All five students in these two disability categories have special health, mobility, and sensory needs. In addition, they also have limited response repertoires and use assistive technology to communicate.

Finally, we introduce you to Jordan, a student with autism. Again, not all children with autism will be assessed using an alternate assessment on alternate achievement standards. Students with autism experience difficulties in the following areas: attending to the salient features of a skill or concept, generalizing skills and concepts to new or novel situations, and self regulating or knowing when to use a skill or concept.

It is not our purpose to develop a separate theory of cognition for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, but rather to understand within the context of our current literature, what might be problematic for students with significant cognitive disabilities, within this most important vertex of the assessment triangle as it is defined for all students. Without a careful consideration of these problematic issues for students with significant cognitive disabilities, it would not be possible to align the other dimensions of the assessment triangle (observation of student performance and interpretation of the meaning of that performance) into a coherent whole that fully gives credit for what students with significant disabilities can learn and do.

Generally speaking, these students come with labels of mental retardation, multiple disabilities, and/or autism. However, they do not generally encompass the entirety of any of these categories. Specifically, students with significant cognitive disabilities experience difficulty in the following areas: attending to the salient features of stimuli, remembering new information, generalizing learned skills to appropriate contexts, self regulating behavior, meta-cognition and skill synthesis. Some of these students may have limited motor response repertories, sensory deficits in both hearing and vision, and special health care needs which may limit participation in school activities. Ultimately, however, it is important to remember that these children have the same general patterns of development as other children and the assumption of competence should always be considered first.

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