Placing Children in Special Education A Strategy for Equity (1982) / Chapter Skim
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3 Assessment: Issues and Methods
3 Assessment: Issues and Methods
Pages 45-73
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From page 45... ...
category are inextricably linked to issues of instruction. One major reason why misclassification is a policy concern is that it may lead to inappropriate educational treatments.
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From page 46... ...
For example, much of the debate surrounding IQ tests has to do with their use in inferring learning potential. Although we sketch the broad outlines of this debate, we base our conclusions about IQ tests primarily on their utility, or lack of utility, in helping educators select and design instructional programs.
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From page 47... ...
COMPREHENSIVE INDIVIDUAL ASSESSMENT The purpose of comprehensive assessment is to locate the source of the child's difficulties in learning in the classroom. In many ways a comprehensive assessment represents an attempt to test, at the individual level, some of the hypotheses about the causes of deficient classroom functioning that were discussed in Chapter 1.
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From page 48... ...
4We recognize that leaders in the field of educational assessment have long recommended against the use of single IQ scores and have urged the use of multiple instruments and careful consideration of performance profiles across subscales within tests for assessing an individual's mental abilities. Our focus on summary scores and use of the term "IQ test" rather than "test of mental abilities" or the like arises because of data cited in Chapter 2 and elsewhere in this report that show that summary scores are often accorded predominant weight in placement decisions.
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From page 49... ...
Most of the existing scientific evidence bears on the contribution of genotypic variation to individual differences in measured (phenotypic) IQ within ethnic groups.
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From page 50... ...
This purely functional definition is motivated by the fact that, within the limits of current knowledge, there are no differences in prognosis or indicated educational "treatment" that distinguish organically caused deficits from experientially caused deficits. That is, children at the same level of functional ability have about the same expected level of future performance and can be taught most effectively in about the same ways, regardless of whether their deficits have a known organic cause, such as Down's syndrome (see Chapter 4 for further discussion of educational treatment)
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From page 51... ...
Finally, one's position on the nature-nurture question gives little or no guidance as to the degree of ethnic imbalance in special education placement that one should be willing to tolerate. As long as there are special programs for children who lack traditional academic skills, environmentalists and hereditarians alike would expect minority children to be overrepresented in such programs, at least for the immediate future.
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From page 52... ...
Rather than addressing the interpretive issue directly, most proponents of testing in the schools place their faith in the empirical phenomenon of predictive validity. Many studies have shown that IQ scores correlate with later school grades and scores on standardized achievement tests (see the paper by Travers in this volume)
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From page 53... ...
The argument is not really about the degree to which IQ tests measure ability versus acquired skills but about the legitimacy of using a test that mixes the two as a basis for educational programming and placement. As Messick (1980)
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From page 54... ...
Bias in the Test Situation Aspects of the test situation, aside from the child's actual skill or ability, that might influence test scores include familiarity with the particular test or type of test (coaching and practice) ; the race and sex of the tester; the language style or dialect of the tester; the tester's expectations about the child's performance; distortions in scoring; time pressure or lack thereof; and attitudinal factors such as test anxiety, achievement motivation, self-esteem, and countercultural motives to avoid conspicuously good performance.
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From page 55... ...
are neither necessary nor sufficient to prove that particular items discriminate against minority children, in the sense of lowering their test scores. An apparently innocent item can be disproportionately difficult for minority children compared with whites, while an item that is problematic on its face can be equally difficult for all groups.
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From page 56... ...
If correlations or loadings for particular items differ conspicuously for minorities and whites, those items are suspect on the grounds that they do not appear to measure the same construct for different groups. None of these psychometric approaches has produced data suggesting that item bias is a major factor causing ethnic differences in test scores.
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From page 57... ...
Conclusion In short, the technical studies of bias surveyed in the foregoing paragraphs indicate at most a relatively modest amount of distortion in the test scores of minority children. There is limited evidence for bias in aspects of the test situation external to the test itself.
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From page 58... ...
Also, as noted at the beginning of this section, outside the field of psychological measurement, bias is often defined as the contribution of sociocultural factors that raise or lower the IQ scores of one group relative to another. Everyone, even the firmest believer in the genetic determination of IQ, admits that there is some cultural contribution, just as there is a cultural contribution to school success.
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From page 59... ...
Translation is thus directly related to what is perhaps the most direct and radical approach to correcting the alleged cultural bias of IQ tests: constructing separate norms for each subcultural group. The logic of culture-specific norms is straightforward: If subcultural groups have qualitatively different "experience pools," leading to differences in average performance, the fairest comparison for any child would seem to be with members of his or her own group, not society at large.
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From page 60... ...
To use acquired skills and knowledge as a measure of intellectual capacity requires, among other assumptions, an assumption of roughly equal motivation and access to relevant experience throughout the tested population an assumption that has repeatedly been challenged. In response, some investigators have attempted to build tests from items for which the assumption seems at least approximately tenable.
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From page 61... ...
INDIVIDUAL MEASURES OUTSIDE THE INTELLECTUAL DOMAIN Even if all the conceptual and technical problems involved in measuring intellectual functioning could be solved, the resulting instrument or instruments would constitute only a part of a fully adequate assessment battery. Many aspects of individual competence lie outside the intellectual
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From page 62... ...
The following two sections examine some general characteristics of major existing measures and discuss salient issues surrounding their use in educational programming and placement. Although we concur with the widely accepted view that biomedical measures and measures of adaptive behavior deserve a place in a comprehensive assessment battery, we also believe that the use of such measures should be guided and evaluated by the same standards that we have applied to cognitive measures, i.e., their contribution to identifying functional needs and pointing toward effective interventions.
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From page 63... ...
Within the limits of current knowledge there appear to be no differences between the educational treatments that work best for children who have global learning difficulties due to physical causes and those that work for other children with global deficits. Future research may lead to medical or educational interventions addressing physically based, global learning problems; if so, identification of long-term physical causes will become a major function of biomedical assessment in educational contexts.
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From page 64... ...
Adaptive Behavior Scales As noted earlier, the AAMD as well as the federal government and many states define mental retardation as "significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning, existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive be
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From page 65... ...
Most of these instruments have been designed specifically for use with mentally retarded people and are particularly appropriate for differentiating levels of functioning in individuals who are clearly below the normal range. However, a few are designed for use in the public school population and are intended to help discriminate "EMR" from "normal" children.
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From page 66... ...
The ABS school version has been standardized on a sample of 2,600 children, including normal children and children identified as EMR, trainable mentally retarded, and educationally handicapped. The standardization sample included a wide range of socioeconomic levels and ethnic backgrounds.
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From page 67... ...
It also depends on how much the social and practical skills measured by adaptive behavior scales contribute to school success. A second potential set of implications concerns the effects of adaptive behavior scales on ethnic disproportions in special education.
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From page 68... ...
To date, the use of adaptive behavior measures in programming has been confined mainly to individuals whose deficiencies in functioning place them well below the EMR range. Measures geared to mildly mentally retarded populations have been used primarily for classification.
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From page 69... ...
We conclude that an ideal assessment process would take place in two phases, beginning with an assessment of the learning environment and proceeding to a comprehensive assessment of the individual child only after it has been established that he or she fails to learn in a variety of classroom settings under a variety of well-conceived instructional strategies.5 Our conclusion is very much in the spirit of P.L. 94-142 and the regulations implementing Section 504 and P.L.
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From page 70... ...
Standardized achievement tests or criterion-referenced performance tests (see below) might serve as assessment devices.
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From page 71... ...
Many informal, teachermade tests are in effect criterion referenced, as are many of the tests included in packaged curricula and teachers' manuals accompanying standard textbooks. Recently, there have been advances in thinking about the design of such tests (e.g., Martuza, 1977; Harris et al., 1974)
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From page 72... ...
This viewpoint has led us to urge a greatly increased emphasis on systematic educational intervention before a child is referred for individual assessment. When poor instruction has been ruled out as a cause of learning failure, it becomes appropriate to look for problems within the child or in the child's environment outside the school, again with an eye toward problems that can be corrected; this is the purpose of individual assessment.
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From page 73... ...
Assessment: Issues and Methods 73 We believe, and have cited evidence to support our belief, that an assessment procedure like the one we outlined will significantly reduce the proportion of children whose failure to learn must be attributed to global intellectual deficits. The question remains whether it is necessary or useful to apply the label EMR to this residual group or to separate them from other children for instructional purposes.
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