NCEO StateLinks

Many states are involved in General Supervision Enhancement Grants (GSEG) and Enhanced Assessment Grants (EAG). The field of inclusive assessment is learning a lot from these funding opportunities. NCEO staff partner with many of these grants as expert advisors, consultants, and technical assistance partners.

We are featuring one GSEG grant and one EAG grant in this issue of StateLinks: (1) the NCEO Multi-state GSEG Consortium Toward a Defensible AA-MAS involving Alabama, Hawaii, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wisconsin; and (2) the Tri-State EAG, hosted by the Georgia Department of Education involving Georgia, Hawaii, and Kentucky.

We would like to feature other GSEG and EAG projects for future issues of StateLinks. Please contact Rachel Quenemoen at quene003@umn.edu if you would like to submit a summary.

For the Multi-state GSEG, NCEO has partnered with five states interested in investigating the characteristics of students who may qualify for an alternate assessment based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS). The consortium is exploring two overarching questions: (1) How can student data be used to improve student assessment and instruction? and (2) What are the intended and unintended consequences of various assessment options?

The project is currently analyzing state data sets to investigate the characteristics of the students who may qualify for this assessment option. A panel of special education, general education, and assessment experts helped design the investigations to ensure that appropriate questions were asked of the data and that the data are mined efficiently. After these analyses are completed, the results will be summarized and reviewed with the experts to develop a better understanding of what these students can do, the issues, and the assessment options.

Future activities include:

• The states will conduct additional studies to learn more about the characteristics of students who may qualify for an AA-MAS.

• State members will develop guidelines for IEP teams with criteria for determining which students should be assessed using an AA-MAS and train IEP teams in how to use these guidelines.

• State members will explore how the instruction and assessment of students who may qualify for an AA-MAS may need to be changed to ensure high expectations for learning and the opportunity for students to demonstrate what they know. The project will explore ways to change an existing assessment or develop a new assessment to better assess targeted students. Each state in the consortium will select one or more options to investigate further.

In the Tri-State EAG, three states designed separate studies to look at different intervention points of their own systems. At the state level, Georgia is studying decision-making policies/practices and assessment design options for persistently low performing students. Hawaii is studying teacher skills and knowledge around learning progressions and formative assessment as a tool to improve achievement for at-risk learners. Kentucky is studying the use of technology to overcome assessment barriers related to disability and how local decision-making and infrastructure affects those options.

Some of the findings/questions that have emerged thus far from Georgia’s investigation are:

• In both the 5th grade and 8th grade cohorts, the project found that persistently low performing students consist of a larger proportion of males, African Americans, students eligible for the free/reduced lunch program, and students with mild intellectual disabilities. The persistently low performing reading population includes a larger proportion of LEP students while the persistently low performing mathematics population does not.

• An important question so far is related to the finding that students with disabilities are disproportionately represented in the group of persistently low performing students. Project investigators wonder whether this suggests that students with disabilities are not getting adequate standards-based instruction. Indeed, another question is whether students with disabilities are being held to a different standard of learning than students without disabilities. Because this question is vital, Georgia’s work has expanded to include a study of the enacted curriculum in classrooms in which students with disabilities and regular education students are being taught.

Some of the findings/questions that have emerged thus far from Hawaii’s investigation are:

• The project developed a Learning Progression Development Cadre of curriculum and content specialists, resource teachers, and general education and special education teachers for mathematics and English/Language Arts respectively. One of the major "lessons learned" by the project in its work on learning progressions is the value provided by having available cadres of committed, seasoned teachers who range from K-12th grade. Also, although the project is only focusing on grades K-8, having each of the three levels—elementary, intermediate, and secondary—enriched the process greatly.

• A set of questions that are not new to Hawaii but that have been posed by Hawaii study participants involves clarification, articulation, and professional development around the question of the connections between learning progressions and classroom instruction, and between formative and summative assessment. Teachers are raising a number of instructional questions that relate to the feasibility and usefulness of learning progressions as a support for instruction.

Some of the findings/questions that have emerged thus far from Kentucky’s investigation are:

• In grades 7 and 8, the percentage of students with disabilities taking the assessment online was almost double that of students testing on paper. Project investigators hypothesize that the middle school years may be a time when reading demands are dramatically increased which, in turn, increases the need for students with print disabilities to seek alternatives such as text reader technology.

• In comparing the performance of these groups with the use of accommodations, the project found that students who tested online using human accommodations (paraphrasing, cueing, dictation) displayed a significantly larger impact from these accommodations than students who tested on paper using the same accommodations. This was true when the use of individual accommodations was examined. Further study is needed to address this finding.

10:15 am–11:45 am, Tuesday, June 17, 2008—Session 16; Plaza International Ballroom B, The Peabody Orlando Hotel. 

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