Examining the Links Between Psychoeducational Assessment, Instruction and Remediation

Abstract

The assessment of students' capabilities and learning outcomes has long been considered an important factor in instructional design and program planning and refinement. The information provided by clinicians, however, has not always been presented to classroom teachers in a form that will allow them to amend their classroom practices to the students' advantage. This paper reviews the recent history of psychoeducational testing and examines several attempts to link assessment with instruction within the information processing domain. The authors present a case for the inclusion of testing procedures that inform teachers of students' information processing capabilities and they argue that clinicians and educators must work together to translate these data into effective remediation and instruction practices.Psychological and skill-based assessment has been, and is likely to remain, an ever-present and concerning aspect of regular and special education. School psychologists and counsellors will continue to collect information about students to place them in appropriate educational settings and teachers will evaluate students' progress so that they can judge whether instruction has been successful.Obtaining information about students is an important first step toward understanding their educational needs but it should also lead to decisions about how best to maximize their learning outcomes and provide relevant instruction or remediation. A perusal of the literature on assessment and observations of testing events that occur in schools, however, will show that the overwhelming preoccupation of counsellors, psychologists and many teachers is screening and classification; in other words, with decisions about the status of the individual (Haywood, Brown & Wingenfeld, 1990). One could be forgiven for thinking that there is only limited interest in taking the second step that links assessment with instructional design and program planning. Indeed, Ysseldyke, Algozzine and Thurlow (1991) commented "a Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:34 14 June 2016 24Ashman and Conway major issue in assessment is the link between assessment information and instruction ... Unfortunately, much that goes on in the assessment of students with disabilities has very limited relevance to intervention" (p. 199).Why is this so and how can the information derived from formal psychological and psychoeducational assessment assist teachers and program developers to construct and deliver effective remediation and instruction?In this paper, we provide some thoughts on this question. We begin by tracing some of the antecedents of contemporary psychoeducational testing practices, review current testing methods, and comment upon their effectiveness. We argue that the nexus between assessment and classroom practice can be achieved if one focus of assessment and instruction is the students' information processing capabilities. Finally, we describe a general classroom-based assessment model that can facilitate the linking of formal and informal as...