Academic Assessment and Intervention

Steven Little, Angeleque Akin-Little, Steven Little, Angeleque Akin-Little

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136265891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Serving students with academic deficiencies necessitates communication and collaboration among professionals from several disciplines. Academic Assessment and Intervention brings together divergent approaches in order to demonstrate that scientific evidence, rather than biases or previous practice, must determine assessment practices that are selected and used for particular purposes.

Similar to a handbook in its comprehensive topical coverage, this edited collection provides a contextual foundation for academic assessment and intervention; describes both norm-referenced and curriculum-based assessment/measurement in detail; considers the implications of both of these assessments on ethnically diverse populations; provides a clear link between assessment, evidence-based interventions and the RTI model; and considers other important topics related to this area such as teacher behavior. Intended primarily for graduate-level courses in education, school psychology, or child clinical psychology, it will also be of interest to practicing professionals in these fields.

Part I
Foundations of Academic Assessment and Intervention

1
Methods of Academic Assessment

Steven G. Little and Angeleque Akin-Little

Assessing students’ academic performance, both individual and as a group, is a vital part of the education process and has been a component of education for as long as formal education has been a part of civilization. Academic assessment can be defined as the process of observing and measuring learning. The rationale for evaluating students’ achievement levels is ultimately to improve student learning by monitoring students’ acquisition of knowledge and progress in mastering the curriculum. Academic assessment can take many forms and can be either formative (non-evaluative, designed to monitor student progress, and guide education decisions) or summative (evaluative, used to assign grades or determine if some predetermined criteria has been met). This chapter will discuss purposes of academic assessment and then summarize the characteristics and uses of norm-referenced tests of academic achievement and curriculum-based measures of academic achievement, each of which will also be discussed in more depth in subsequent chapters.

Purpose of Academic Assessment

Salvia and Ysseldyke (1995) identified the main purposes of academic assessment as specifying and verifying problems and to make decisions. While these purposes certainly continue to exist today, Lawrence (2013) better clarifies the purpose of academic assessment as (a) Identifying student strengths and weaknesses, (b) Monitoring student progress, and (c) Assessing student prior knowledge. In addition, the No Child Left Behind (No Child Left Behind [NCLB], 2002) legislation mandated that every child in every public and charter school in the country be tested in reading and math in Grades 3 through 8 and at least once in Grades 10 to 12, with science assessments administered at least once during Grades 3 to 5; 6 to 9; and 10 to 12. The need for academic assessments to fulfill the requirements of NCLB has therefore increased since the law’s implementation. These “high stakes” assessments will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

Academic assessment can be focused on an individual or a group. When the focus is on an individual student, the purpose of the assessment tends to be on the individual needs of that student, such as identifying strengths and weaknesses, measuring acquisition or retention of knowledge or skills, and evaluating performance relative to expected levels of performance (Shapiro, 2000). When the focus is on a group, such as a classroom, school, or district, the purpose of the assessment is more on evaluating whether the school or district is meeting certain objectives, either self-identified objectives or ones mandated by NCLB or other legislation. The type of assessment used for the purpose of assessing the individual may be either norm-referenced or curriculum-based. Group assessments tend to be exclusively norm-referenced.

Norm-Referenced Tests of Academic Achievement

Norm-referenced assessment is an assessment where student performance or the collective performance of multiple students is compared to a larger group. Usually, the larger group or “norm group” is a national sample that is selected to be representative of the population of the country. Individual students, classrooms, schools, school districts, and states are compared or rank-ordered in relation to the norm group. The comparison being made is generally with same-age peers from the test’s norm group. An examinee’s test score is compared to that of a norm group by converting the examinee’s raw scores into derived or scaled scores (e.g., standard scores, percentile ranks, age-equivalent scores, grade-equivalent scores) that correspond to the normal curve, thus providing an interpretive framework for those who were administered the norm-referenced test. While the majority of commercially successful norm-referenced tests of academic achievement are standardized on a norm group, representative of the population of children from the United States (i.e., a national norm group), it can consist of a smaller, more-limited population, such as all children in an individual school or school district (i.e., a local norm group).

Ornstein (1993) presented a number of strengths of norm-referenced test including: (a) they generally maintain adequate statistical rigor and are reliable (i.e., dependable and stable) and valid (i.e., measure what they are reported to measure); (b) test items are generally of high quality as they are developed by test experts, piloted, and undergo revision before they are included in the test; and (c) administration procedures are standardized and the test items are designed to rank examinees for the purpose of placing them in specific programs or instructional groups. Using local norms also has specific advantages. Stewart and Kaminski (2002) reported that local norms have the added advantage of providing meaningful information regarding average performance in a particular school or school district. Other advantages of using local norms include a decrease in the probability of bias in educational decision-making, because individual test performance is compared to others who share similar demographic and background factors. They also allow school systems the option of comparing data on students’ educational outcomes to the curriculum to which students have been exposed. Finally, local norms help in the identification of students at highest risk for academic failure as the comparison is being made to similar students who have been exposed to the same curriculum.

The most common criticism of norm-referenced academic assessment is that their content is most likely not aligned with curricular content taught in any specific school or district (i.e., content validity). Ideally, the content of the items on a norm-referenced test should closely match the content of the curriculum taught in a classroom. The greater the mismatch between test content and curricular content, the more difficult it becomes to design efficacious interventions for students in need. Norm-referenced tests also do not allow for a close monitoring of academic progress over an extended period of time. They only provide a measure of achievement in comparison to a norm group at one specific point in time (Shapiro, 2011).

Subsequent chapters discuss norm-referenced assessment of academic achievement in more detail. Flanagan, Alfonso, and Dixon (Chapter 4) discuss salient features of academic achievement batteries and provide information on nine achievement batteries along a number of different dimensions. Riccio, Dennison, and Bowman-Perrott (Chapter 5) review measures used in the individual assessment of academic skills, with specific emphasis on the areas of reading, written expression, and mathematics. Little and Akin-Little (Chapter 6) review selected published group academic assessment batteries that have been used in states and districts throughout the country and discuss their use with regard to requirements of NCLB and other legislation. Finally, Clinton and Olvera (Chapter 7) discuss norm-referenced assessment with regard to bilingual populations. Specifically, they address second language acquisition processes, important factors in the assessment of ELL students as well as discussing specific norm-referenced measures and their uses and limitations for this population.

Curriculum-Based Measures of Academic Achievement

The term curriculum-based assessment (CBA) refers to measurement that uses direct observation and recording of a student’s performance in the local curriculum as a basis for gathering information to make instructional decisions (Deno, 2003). While there may be different models of CBA, they all share the basic assumption that testing should correspond to what is taught. CBA emphasizes the direct, repeated assessment of academic behaviors via probes (e.g., brief reading passages, short spelling lists, math item) from books or materials that make up the child’s curriculum. The focus is, therefore, on how well a student performs on the materials that are being used in the classroom. The rationale is that if data are collected frequently, the student’s progress with the curriculum can be monitored and teaching modifications can be made as needed to improve academic performance (Witt, Elliot, Daly, Gresham, & Kramer, 1998). According to Hintze, Christ, and Methe (2006), most forms of CBA rely on global curriculum being broken down into a set of ordered subskills from which assessment material is constructed.

The most obvious advantage of CBA is that it is aligned with the curriculum (i.e., the student is being tested on what is being taught). CBA is also easy to develop, quickly administered, and easy to score and monitor. In addition, studies have found high correlations between CBA scores on reading and math and achievement levels on high-stakes. For example, Good, Simmons, and Kame’enui (2001) found that students who, at the beginning of third grade, were able to read more than 110 words correctly in one minute were likely to pass the Oregon statewide test. Other advantages include continuous measurement, as CBAs are administered frequently; they are sensitive to short-term gains in academic skills; teachers can quickly determine whether a child’s academic skills are delayed, comparable to, or ahead of classmates; and they help plan and monitor the effectiveness of interventions (McLane, 2006). It is hard to identify specific disadvantages to curriculum-based assessment. It is possible that teaching might be narrowed to focus only on those areas being assessed, but good teaching practices should help avoid this issue. It is also possible that teacher evaluations could be tied to student progress as measured by the CBA process. Further, one disadvantage is finding adequately trained educational personnel to administer these assessments, as they do require more expertise than the administration of a norm-referenced tool. Again, this is not so much a disadvantage of CBA but, rather, a more systemic issue in schools, and one that is not limited to CBA.

Subsequent chapters discuss curriculum-based assessment of academic achievement in more detail. Christ, Keller-Margulis, and Marcotte (Chapter 8) discuss the underlying assumptions and critical features of CBA. They also examine prominent methods of CBA, including Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), Brief Experimental Analysis (BEA), Curriculum-Based Assessment for Instructional Design (CBA-ID), Curriculum-Based Assessment Criterion Referenced (CBA-CR), and Curriculum-Based Evaluation (CBE). Phillips, Shinn, and Ditkowsky (Chapter 9) summarize the history and current use of technology in published CBM products. Brown, Steege, and Bickford (Chapter 10) provide an overview of Response to Intervention/Multi-Tier Systems of Support (RTI/MTSS), and discuss how they can be used to implement effective assessment practices in schools. Finally, Vanderwood, Tung, and Hickey (Chapter 11) discuss the challenges faced when using CBA procedures with culturally and linguistically diverse students and how to overcome these challenges.

Conclusions

Assessing academic performance is a critical aspect of the education process for all students. This chapter discusses the general purposes of academic assessment, summarizes the characteristics and uses of norm-referenced tests of academic achievement and curriculum-based measures of academic achievement, discusses the strengths and weakness of each type of assessment, and summarizes subsequent chapters that discuss these tests and issues associated with these tests in more detail.

References

Deno, S. L. (2003). Developments in curriculum-based measurement. Journal of Special Education, 37, 184–192.

Good, R. H., Simmons, D. C., & Kame’enui, E. J. (2001). The importance and decision-making utility of a continuum of fluency-based indicators of foundational reading skills for third-grade high-stakes outcomes. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5, 257–288.

Hintze, J. M., Christ, T. J., & Methe, S. A. (2006). Curriculum-based assessment. Psychology in the Schools, 43, 45–56.

Lawrence, B. M. (2013). What is the purpose of classroom assessments? Retrieved from http://www.ehow.com/facts_7651703_purpose-classroom-assessments.html#ixzz2UbwxvTEh

McLane, K. (2006). Curriculum-based measurement and statewide assessments. Retrieved from http://www.studentprogress.org/

Ornstein, A. C. (1993). Norm referenced and criterion referenced tests: An overview. NASSP Bulletin, 77 (555), 28–39. (Reprinted from H. Torrance (Ed.), (2012). Educational assessment and evaluation. New York, NY: Routledge.)

Salvia, J., & Ysseldyke, J. E. (1995). Assessment is special and remedial education. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Shapiro, E. S. (2000). Academic assessment of performance. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology, Vol. 1 (pp. 10–14). Washington, DC: APA Press.

Shapiro, E. S. (2011). Academic skills problems (4th ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Stewart, L. H., & Kaminski, R. (2002). Best practices in developing local norms for academic problem solving. In A. Thomas & J. Grimes (Eds.), Best practices in school psychology IV (pp. 737–752). Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.

Witt, J. C., Elliot, S. N., Daly, E. J., Gresham, F. M., & Kramer, J. J. (1998). Assessment of at-risk and special needs children (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

2
A General Case Framework for Academic Intervention

George H. Noell and Kristin A. Gansle

Academic expectations are a central developmental reality for children living in industrial and information age societies. Academic expectations are set in a social context that emphasizes normative rates of progress and comparative levels of achievement for keystone skills and performance on high-stakes assessments (Ditkowsky & Koonce, 2010). It can be argued reasonably that students do not have academic performance deficits in any absolute sense. All students are performing at the level one should expect, given their genetic endowment, motivation, prior skills, the quality of instruction they receive, and their family/community support. Viewed from this perspective, behavior per se is neither wrong nor right, but is the expression of one’s cumulative experiences (Skinner, 1953). Academic deficits are a mismatch between students’ current levels of academic performance and expectations for peers. The large number of children who are identified as exhibiting academic deficits is a foreseeable feature of any developmental system that sets expectations based on normative comparisons at specific points in time and normative expectations for rates of progress between those times (Nese, Park, Alonzo, & Tindal, 2011; Zigmond & Kloo, 2009). By definition, one in 10 students will always be in the bottom 10% of performers, and half of all students will always be behind the average student in acquiring any skill. These normative statistical realities are evident throughout our educational landscape in areas such as the rate of referral to special education (Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services [OSERS], December 2011).

The description above is not intended as an argument against standards, but as an acknowledgement that the way we traditionally have set standards ensures that some group of students will always be identified as failing to meet them. It is also intended to highlight that what we call an academic deficit is a mismatch between expectations and performance, rather than an absolute feature of either performance or stude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: FOUNDATIONS OF ACADEMIC ASSESSMENT AND INTERVENTION
• PART II: NORM-REFERENCED ASSESSMENT
• PART III: CURRICULUM-BASED ASSESSMENT
• PART IV: SPECIFIC ACADEMIC INTERVENTIONS AND ISSUES
• List of Contributors
• Index