Test Design Considerations for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

Anderson, Daniel; Farley, Dan; Tindal, Gerald

doi:10.1177/0022466913491834

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Furthermore, what we found is consistent with what Anderson, Farley, and Tindal (2015) found in their work with standardized assessments, that these accommodations provided our students access to the assessments and did not compromise, but rather improved, reliability. They had stated that one concern with accommodations is that they can be administered unreliably and increase the unreliability of the exam; this concern was particularly high for accommodations where the administrator could be a factor.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Alternate Assessment Formats for Progress Monitoring Students With Intellectual Disabilities and Below Average IQ: An Exploratory Study

Jones

Gifford

Yovanoff

et al. 2018

Focus Autism Other Dev Disabl

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As part of standards-based reforms, there is increasing emphasis on ensuring that students with moderate intellectual disabilities (ID), including students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), learn to read. There is also converging evidence that explicit teaching of letter sounds, phonics, and sight words is effective for this population, but that students’ responsiveness varies. A critical part of individualizing reading instruction for students with disabilities is the reliable assessment of progress and mastery of reading skills. However, assessment of many students with ID and students with ASD is challenging because of attention, behavioral, and communication issues related to testing situation; therefore, obtaining consistent results often proves to be a difficult task. We hypothesized that alternate assessment presentation formats, as a testing accommodation, would improve the reliability, validity, and consistency of assessment performance. In this study, three different presentation formats—word lists, flash cards, and PowerPoint presentation—were used when administering proximal, curriculum-based reading assessments to determine whether a particular format increased student engagement, reduced the need for prompts, and increased accuracy of identifying known items on the test. While statistical analyses did not support the hypothesis of a format by student effect, visual analysis of the data did suggest that the number of prompts required varied by student as a function of assessment format. Most noteworthy, assessment reliability, estimated with generalizability theory, indicated that reliability increased as a function of format by student.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Alternate Assessment Formats for Progress Monitoring Students With Intellectual Disabilities and Below Average IQ: An Exploratory Study

Jones

Gifford

Yovanoff

et al. 2018

Focus Autism Other Dev Disabl

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Students' levels of independence were tested prior to the administration of content tasks to provide appropriate supports during administration, but performance was based only on content task items. Furthermore, the AA was designed for flexible, yet standardized administration, to meet the unique needs of all students while producing scores directly comparable across students (Anderson, Farley, & Tindal, 2013). All accommodations afforded to students taking the GA were likewise made available for students taking the AA.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of Statewide Test Participation for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

et al. 2015

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Students with significant cognitive disabilities are eligible to participate in two statewide testing options for accountability: alternate assessments or general assessments with appropriate accommodations. Participation guidelines are generally quite vague, leading to students "switching" test participation between years. In this study, we tracked test participation for two cohorts of students with a documented disability over 3 years. Results suggested approximately 25% of students who initially took the alternate assessment switched test type at least once, although patterns of switching were not consistent across disabilities. Students on the performance "bubble" were more likely to switch test participation. Test switching poses challenges for monitoring students' academic growth within accountability frameworks.

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“…A total of 40 Content task items were included. Anderson, Farley, and Tindal (2013) determined that the Prerequisite Skills task functioned as a mediator of student disability on latent content knowledge; in addition, the researchers determined that the factor structures for the Standard and Scaffold versions were equivalent. Anderson and colleagues' study provided empirical evidence that the test design was working as intended and provided comparable results across versions.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Reading Growth in Grades 3 to 5 With an Alternate Assessment

Farley

Anderson

Irvin

et al. 2016

Remedial and Special Education

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Modeling growth for students with significant cognitive disabilities (SWSCD) is difficult due to a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, missing data, test scaling, group heterogeneity, and small sample sizes. These challenges may account for the paucity of previous research exploring the academic growth of SWSCD. Our study represents a unique context in which a reading assessment, calibrated to a common scale, was administered statewide to students in consecutive years across Grades 3 to 5. We used a nonlinear latent growth curve pattern-mixture model to estimate students’ achievement and growth while accounting for patterns of missing data. While we observed significant intercept differences across disability subgroups, there were no significant slope differences. Incorporating missing data patterns into our models improved model fit. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

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Test Design Considerations for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

Cited by 5 publications

References 17 publications

Alternate Assessment Formats for Progress Monitoring Students With Intellectual Disabilities and Below Average IQ: An Exploratory Study

Alternate Assessment Formats for Progress Monitoring Students With Intellectual Disabilities and Below Average IQ: An Exploratory Study

Patterns of Statewide Test Participation for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

Modeling Reading Growth in Grades 3 to 5 With an Alternate Assessment

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