The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), and the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) collaborated to compile essential Parent Materials that compliment their Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students with Disabilities (Tool Kit). As strengthening parent engagement is a priority for the Department, resources in this Tool Kit answers some of the most common questions parents have related to teaching and assessing students with disabilities. The assessments section explains to parents how their children with disabilities can participate in state and district assessments, what alternate assessments are available for their child, and the ins and outs of what progress monitoring. Resources in the accommodations section explore what types of accommodations are available for a child in instruction, assessment, and response to intervention. The final two sections, Instructional Practices and Behavior, help parents target specific problems in a child’s reading skills and better understand functional behavioral assessments and interventions.
For each area, users will find a description of each resource, including its citation and target audience.
This Tool Kit is an example of the Department of Education’s ongoing commitment to ensuring that states, local school districts, schools, and families have the most current and relevant information about practices that will improve and enhance educational opportunities for students with disabilities throughout the nation.
This toolkit was created in 2004.
Assessment Issues
State and district assessments are used to provide information on the educational progress of students. Today these assessments are a key part of standards-based reform and are used to measure the extent to which students are meeting standards. These resources introduce how assessment, alternate assessment, and progress monitoring apply to students with disabilities.
Accommodations
This section discusses accommodations to that can be made to instruction, assessment, and response to intervention in order to help educators meet accountability requirements, examine data, and make meaningful decisions about the overall effectiveness of their instruction.
Instructional Practices
This section provides two resources designed to help parents understand the specific problems their child may have with reading and explore approaches to improving literacy skills.
Behavior
This section provides resources that help parents explore interventions, behavior accommodations and modifications to better understand functional behavioral assessment and positive interventions.