West Visayas Stae University

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
Graduate School
Luna St, Lapaz, Iloilo City

SPD 503: Psychological and Diagnostic Assessment of Individual with Special Needs

Topic: ASSESSMENT IN CORE ACHIEVEMENT AREAS Discussant: Jhee Marvin V. Huele, M.Ed SPED

Assessment Procedures is based on the following context

• Content being taught
• Criterion to which content is being learned
• Characteristics of the student

Core Achievement Areas are assess in this following areas

• The skills and information to be learned within the curriculum.
• The assessment of skills to be learned
• The assessment of understanding of information and concept

READING
Decoding Skills
• relies on students’ ability to analyze and manipulate sounds (Stanovic, 2000)
• Instruction in the beginning reading includes
• Letter recognition
• Letter sound correspondences
• Sight vocabulary
• Phonics
• Morphology
•
• During the acquisition of specific skills, teachers should stress on the accuracy of students responses.
• During the acquisition of specific skills, teachers should stress on the accuracy of students responses.
• A generally accepted criterion for completion for early learning is 90 to 95 percent correct.
• As soon as accuracy has been attained, teachers change their criteria from accurate responses to fast
and accurate responses.
• Once students accurately decode letters and letter combinations fluently, the emphasis shifts to
FLUENCY.
• is a combination of speed and accuracy and is widely viewed as fundamental prerequisite for
reading comprehension.
(National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 2000a, 2000b)

Reading Comprehension Skill can be assess through

• students’ retelling
• The most direct method is to have student to retell what they have read without access
to the reading passage.
• Retelling maybe conducted orally or in writing.
• Teacher can listen to the students’ retell, or students can retell using tape recorders for
evaluation.
• response to comprehension question
• Ask students question about what they have read.
• Questions should address main ideas, important relationships and relevant details.
• Teachers’ question must be focus on the gist of the passage.
• rate of oral reading
• Indirect method of assessing reading comprehension
• Poor decoding skills created a bottleneck that impeded the flow of information, thus
impeding comprehension. Laberge and Samuels, 1974
• Slow readers must expend their energy decoding words rather than concentrating in the
meaning of what is written.
• Teachers should concentrate on the rate of oral reading regularly with beginning
readers.
• To assess reading rate, teachers should have students read for 2 minutes from
appropriate materials.
• The passage must include vocabulary, syntax and content and must be longer than the
amount any student can read in 2 minutes.
 Advanced Skills
 Student who have already mastered sight vocabulary and decoding skill generally read silently.
 Decoding moves from oral reading to silent reading with sub vocalization to visual scanning
without sub vocalization.
 Scanning for main ideas and information may also be taught systematically.
 Reading Comprehension may go beyond the literal comprehension of the passage.
 Summarizing, drawing inferences, recognizing and understanding symbolism, sarcasm, irony and
so forth can also be taught.
 The gist of the passage is very important than the details.

INFORMAL READING INVENTORY

 Assess decoding and reading comprehension over a wide range of skill levels within the specific
reading curriculum in the classroom.
 IRI are given to locate the reading levels at which a student reads independently, requires
instruction and is frustrated.
 Techniques to define reading levels vary.
 Teachers should use a series of graded passages that range from below a students’ actual placement
to a year or two above the actual placement.
 If a reading series is prepared for several grade level is used, passages can be selected from the
beginning, middle, and end of each grade level.
 Students begin reading the easiest material and continue reading until they can decode less than
85% of the words.
 Salvia and Hughes (1990) recommend an accuracy rate of 95% accuracy level for independent
reading and 85% to 95% accuracy level for students that require instruction.

MATHEMATICS
 The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has adopted standards for pre-kindergarten through
secondary education.
 The standards deal with the CONTENT (that is number, measurement, algebra, geometry, data,
statistics) and PROCESS (that is reasoning, representation, problem solving, connection and
communication)
 The standards deal with the CONTENT (that is number, measurement, algebra, geometry, data,
statistics) and PROCESS (that is reasoning, representation, problem solving, connection and
communication)
 In noninclusive special education settings, math content is generally stressed (that is readiness skills,
vocabulary and concepts, numeration, whole number operations, fractions and decimals, ratios and
percentage, measurement and geometry)
 At any grade level, the specific skills and concepts included in each of these subdomains will depend o
the state standards and the particular curriculum and its sequencing.
 Mathematics curriculum usually contain both problem sets that require only computations and word
problems that has two step computation and an application of correct mathematical solutions.
 The difficulty of application problems goes well beyond the difficulty of the computation involved and
related to the following factors:
1. The number of steps involved in the solution
2. The amount extraneous information
3. Whether the mathematical operation is directly implied by the vocabulary used in the problem.
Beginning Skills
 The whole number operation of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are the core of
elementary education curriculum.
 Readiness for beginning students includes the basics as classification, one-to-one correspondence
and counting.
 Vocabulary and concepts are generally restricted to quantitative words and spatial concepts.
 Numerations deals with the writing and identifying numerals, counting, ordering and so forth.
 See – Write - Is the most frequently used assessment format in mathematical skills.
 Accuracy is stressed and 90 to 95 % correct is commonly used as criterion.
 For the computation, accuracy and fluency are stressed in the beginning mathematics; teachers do
not stop their instruction when student does not respond accurately but continue to build
automaticity.
 When teaching fluency, teachers usually use PROBES.
 The actual criterion rate will depend on the operation, the type of material and characteristics of
each student. Example: addition facts versus addition of two-digit number with regrouping
  Students with motor difficulties may be held to a lower criterion or assessed with say-say format.

Advanced Skills
 The more advanced mathematical skills (that is fraction, decimals, ratios, percentages, geometry) build
on whole number operations.
 These skills are taught to levels of comprehension and application.
 Assessment formats are almost exclusive to see-write format and accuracy is stressed over fluency,
except for a few facts such as “half equals 0.5 equals 50%.
 Teacher must take into account the extent to which specific disability will interfere with the
performance of advanced skills.
SPELLING - is the production of letters in the correct sequence to form a word.
 Specific word may assigned as spelling words may come from different sources; spelling curricula, word lists,
content areas or students own written work.
 In fourth grade, spelling word are typically assigned and students are left to their own to learn them.
 But in the first three grades, spelling is taught systematically using phonics, morphology, rote memorization
and the combination of three.
 Teacher may assess mastery of the pre-spelling rules associated with the particular approach they are
teaching.
 Teacher assess mastery of spelling in at least four ways:
o Recognition Response
o Spelling dictated single word
o Spelling words in context
o Students’ self-monitoring of errors

WRITTEN LANGUAGE
 Assessment differs widely for beginners and advanced students.
 Once the preliminary skills of letter formation and rudimentary spelling have been mastered, written-
language curricula usually stressed both content and style that is grammar mechanics and diction.

Beginning Skills
 The most basic instruction of written language is penmanship, in which the formation and spacing of
uppercase and lowercase printed and cursive letters are taught.
 Early instruction stresses accuracy and criteria are generally qualitative.
 After the accuracy has been attained, teachers may provide extended activities to practice automaticity.
 For beginners, content generation is often reduced to generation of words in meaningful sequence.
 Teacher may use story starters (that is pictures or a few word that act as stimuli) to prompt student
writing.
 When the allotted time is over, teachers count the number of the words or divide the number of word
by the time to obtain a measure of rate.
 Teachers also percentage of correct word to assess content production.
 To be considered correct, the word must be spelled correctly, be capitalized if appropriate, be
grammatically correct, and be followed by the correct punctuation. (Isaacson 1988)
 Teaching usually boils down to focussing on capitalization, simple punctuation, and basic grammar
 Teachers may also use multiple choice or fill-in test to assess comprehension of grammatical
conventions or rules.
Advanced Skills
 Comprehension and application of advanced grammar and mechanics can be tested readily with
multiple choice or fill-in questions.
 Evaluation of content generation by advanced students is far more difficult than counting correct words.
 Teachers may consider the quality of ideas, the sequencing of ideas, the coherence of ideas, and
consideration of the reading audience.
 In practice, teacher use holistic judgements of content (Cooper 1977)
 Teachers may point out errors in style or indicate topics that might benefits from greater elaboration or
clarification.
 Objective scoring of any of these attributes is very difficult, and extended scoring keys and practice are
necessary to obtain reliable judgement.