Suchergebnisse

Connecticut's Skills Checklist was developed in response to federal policy that requires all students with significant cognitive disabilities participate in state assessments and be included in measures of adequate yearly progress. Test developers had high expectations for this assessment. In addition to its function as an accountability measure, the assessment was designed to change the nature of classroom instruction for this population. In this study, special education teachers in Grades 4, 6, and 10 completed a survey of their instructional practices after submitting accountability data. Combined survey and accountability data indicated that teachers did not instruct students on the breadth of content included on the Skills Checklist. Study data suggest patterns of academic content that are accessible not only for this population of students but for their teachers as well. Moreover, findings from this study have profound implications on the validity of the assessment data.

Bilingual education has had a complex and controversial history in the United States. Bilingual education evaluators have been hampered by a lack of administrative support, a controversial political environment, and numerous technical difficulties. Since bilingual education programs are quite complex from an evaluation standpoint, it is not at all obvious how evaluators should best proceed in order to design and conduct useful evaluations. This article reviews part of the history of bilingual education and its implications for evaluation practice. Technical problems in conducting a bilingual evaluation are identified and strategies for coping with these problems are discussed. These strategies are based on the evaluation design that has been developed and implemented statewide in Connecticut. Finally, strategies for improving evaluation capabilities and for using evaluation results at the federal, state, and local levels are presented.