Assessing Students with Disabilities, Mastering Assessment: A Self-Service System for Educators, Pamphlet 3

The pressure to raise students’ test scores has never been higher, and this pressure may be most keenly felt by teachers of students with disabilities. Should teachers reduce assessment expectations for these youngsters and thereby abandon any realistic hope for attaining a child’s full potential? Or should teachers employ accommodations and alternate assessment tactics that, even if signifi cant, will often lead to failure for the child? This booklet, Assessing Students with Disabilities, explores key dimensions of this vexing dilemma.

The MASTERING ASSESSMENT series is a set of fifteen practical, easy-to-use booklets covering a wide range of topics related to educational assessment and accountability. These groundbreaking booklets put the most relevant information on assessment at teachers’ fingertips and provide an important resource for educators looking to learn the ins and outs of becoming “assessment literate.” Paired with the series' F acilitator's Guide (available for download at no additional charge from Pearson's Instructor Resource Center), Mastering Assessment is the perfect tool for building assessment literacy either in self-study or a professional development program.

Don't miss all the books in the Mastering Assessment series by W. James Popham:

• Appropriate and Inappropriate Tests for Evaluating Schools

• Assessing Students’ Affect

• Assessing Students with Disabilities

• Assessment Bias: How to Banish It

• Classroom Evidence of Successful Teaching

• College Entrance Examinations: The SAT and the ACT

• Constructed-Response Tests: Building and Bettering

• How Testing Can Help Teaching

• Interpreting the Results of Large-Scale Assessments

• Portfolio Assessment and Performance Testing

• Reliability: What Is It and Is It Necessary?

• Selected-Response Tests: Building and Bettering

• The Role of Rubrics in Testing and Teaching

• Test Preparation: Sensible or Sordid?

• Validity: Assessment’s Cornerstone