California special ed teachers: I recently attended a conference about the essential standards & goals and objectives. I was wondering if anyone knew of an assessment that correlates to the CA standards, one that could be administered to students yearly (a criterion-referenced assessment, I guess).
I think the goals and objectives that correlate to the standards written by CARS are good. But now we need easy assessment. Can anyone help?
Thanks
I personally am finding the process of having to write “standards-based” IEPs a small frustration and a waste of my time. Excuse my bluntness. I have always done a thorough assessment of my students’ needs and I do understand the reading process and the skills needed to become a good reader. I have always written good goals to move my students forward each year. I tailor the goals to the particular student.
I have students who possess great comprehension skills, but who either cannot read words or who can read words but do so very slowly. Then, I have a smaller few who can read words w/o comprehension. I am finding that the standards are not written in an IEP friendly manner and I really don’t like the CARS standards. Many of them give little information, they are too broad and not broken into specific enough increments. So, I write my own (as I always have) and find the closest thing in the standards to reference on the IEP.
What do we have to measure? First of all, I personally don’t care about the standards. They are an extra added annoyance designed by people who don’t trust me to do my job as an attempt to force me to do my job. Since I am already doing my job and my students do progress, I use the Woodcock Johnson annually to compare standard scores to look for overall movement in the right direction. I then use informal reading inventories to assess reading rate, accuracy and comprehension. I use purchased materials from companies like Steck Vaughn and Barnell Loft to gather more data on very specific skills assessed on a multiple choice format. I have a phonics inventory I have created and I use programs like Read Naturally and Great Leaps to teach fluency and to measure fluency growth. In all, I can create a very complete profile for each annual review and good measures for benchmarks.
Standards do not change the fact that I must teach the child the skills that he or she is missing to move forward into greater independence.
I rely minimally on the SAT 9 (changing this spring, I know) and the STAR for my population. Sometimes I get a student who can do pretty well on some areas. Usually, slow reading rate precludes scoring well on standardized tests and processing speed is almost always a serious issue with LD. For this reason I take many individual measures and compare to the previous year’s measures so the parents can see the growth.
My ultimate goal, of course, after several years of resource, is to give the child the tools he or she needs to eventually score better on these tests and more importantly to be able to read with comfort and to choose to read. But, putting all this together takes time.