The Lindsay Lohan Award for Poor Judgment or Dopey Doings in the Annals of Testing

7/24/2013

Typically, if instruction uses a read-to accommodation, then assessment should include a read-to accommodation. Hence, if the reading instruction that students with disabilities have primarily been receiving is chock full of read-to accommodations, then students with disabilities begin to depend upon that accommodation and never learn to fully read for themselves. If we really want to foster reading independence in students with disabilities, then we will have to use close reading and repeated reading consistently during instruction in order to scaffold struggling readers to self-sufficient reading.

7/26/2013

To provide a very different perspective, students will disabilities are legally entitled to equitable access to an assessment. That means students with disabilities should have the right to use their assistive technology to access the content of the assessment. In the case of print, converting that print into another form (such as audio) is done via technology. This is the way students with disabilities will access print in college and their careers. It is a lifelong way of “reading” for these students. At some point in their educational career a decision was made to utilize some form of “text-to-speech” technology to compensate for their reading skill deficit to ensure they had access to the curricula and could reach their highest educational achievement. The PARCC policy simply allows these students to demonstrate academic content proficiency in the same way they will do so in college and the same way they will perform their job functions. To prohibit them from using this technology and perform poorly on the assessment provides a very inaccurate picture of their true college and career readiness.

7/26/2013

That makes sense Diane, or it would if there were some way of measuring this disability separate from the poor performance in the academic skill itself, and if the accommodation hadn't been found to provide an enhanced level of performance (school age kids understand more that they listen to than that they read).

Decoding is central to reading; often when someone has difficulty reading something they ask somebody else what the text says (this is very common in countries like Egypt with high illiteracy rates, and it likely happens in colleges and on the job in the U.S.). It isn't an accommodation, it is a work around--since I can't read how else can I find out. As such this accommodation should be available to everybody or at least kids should be allowed to ask each other what the text says. The problem, of course, is that it twists the purpose of the testing so badly that we can't find out how well our population can read.

7/27/2013

Your response seems to make a bright-line distinction between written language and oral language. For students with disabilities these kinds of distinctions must be “bridged” due to the disability. You must be able to convert information into different forms for people with disabilities to access it (auditory to visual to tactile and all combinations). Based on this distinction between oral and written language, it seems you are saying that a student who has a decoding problem should be scored non-proficient on all of the English/Language Arts assessment (the whole academic area) because of the access skill deficit. For students with disabilities, we know when they have decoding problems as we have reams of diagnostic information about the minutia of that skill deficit. And we are trying or have tried every instructional technique that has any kind of proven efficacy to remediate those specific skill deficits. However, these students can achieve independent academic proficiency in English/Language Arts and non-decoding reading areas with the use of AT to compensate for their skill deficit. And they can be highly successful in college and careers using AT. It just seems illogical to deny them use of the AT so that the CCSS assessment can say they are “non-proficient”. That would seem to make the CCSS assessment an invalid measure of their true college and career readiness.

7/27/2013


I understand the basis of your position, but PARCC has made clear the use of this accommodation will invalidate the student's reading score, their assessment outcomes will be notated, "...no claims should be inferred regarding the student’s ability to demonstrate foundational print reading skills (decoding and fluency). Ongoing instruction in the foundational skills should be provided to allow students to continue to attain the important college and career-ready skill of independent reading" (Draft PARCC Accessibility Features and Accommodations Manual, June 2013, p. 29). Statistical perameters imposed by NCLB requirements currently subject students who through no fault of their own or their teachers cannot read at or near grade level. What point is there is making students who cannot read sit through painful exams year in and year out. What research says that debasement strengthens decoding skills? See my blog: What is the Fairness in Forcing Standardized Assessment on Special Needs Students?

7/29/2013


I appreciate that another perspective is explained here - thanks Diane. However I am puzzled by your mocking tone, Tim because I believe that this is a question that deserves serious consideration. There are valid points of view on both sides and dismissing a technology accommodation as a "dopey doing" does not do justice to this question. For one thing, this reading accommodation is not assigned arbitrarily but is the result of recommendation from a team of educators (and parents) who know the student well and have determined that the need for accommodation exists due to a disability. An example of a disability so addressed is dyslexia. Is it not important to consider the judgement of the teachers and parents who know the student well and who have worked with him or her to improve reading skills? Are you really saying that a system-wide prohibition should be put in place that contradicts the consideration of that team? We have seen too many kids leave school in frustration because their disability was not understood or accommodated. We now have technology that allows students to process text in different ways. From my perspective, it would be dopey indeed to continue to leave these students out.

11/21/2013

Thank you Diane. It is unfair to call learning disabled children, their families, or the educators who are dedicated to helping them hysterical. This article shows everything that is wrong about such an outdated educational philosophy.