Special Education Evaluations 

Before a student can be found eligible for special education and related services, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted to determine if the student has a suspected disabling condition and a corresponding report is then generated. As was previously mentioned, these evaluations and subsequent reports should identify a student’s strengths and weaknesses related to participation and progress in the general education curriculum and program. However, too often, practitioners’ assessments have focused exclusively on IDEA’s eligibility categories with insufficient attention to the student’s educational needs, despite IDEA’s mandates. IDEIA 2004 also includes a number of provisions that will focus resources on pre-referral interventions, which should provide schools, teachers, and parents with more information about the student’s educational needs.

Another significant change is IDEIA’s seeming preference for functional instead of standardized assessments. According to Dan Reschley, “…to date despite claims of ‘robust’ relationships, there has never been a study with an adequate experimental design documenting enhanced child learning or behavioral outcomes using cognitive processing principles of the kind that are measured by currently available standardized tests.”¹  Without entering into this heated debate and because of the huge number of standardized assessments available and in use, this training module will only focus on functional assessments.

Reschley's above criticism focused on standardized tests and not the importance of cognitive processing in understanding why a student may be experiencing learning problems and making corresponding recommendations for interventions. The hyperlinked cognitive processing model can provide guidance in this process, including identifying a student's cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Also, despite the seeming movement away from standardized tests, they will still be required for certain disabling conditions (e.g., Communication Impaired, Cognitively Impaired, and Specific Learning Disabilities, if the district remains with the "significant discrepancy" criteria instead of adopting a "Response to Intervention" model.) In addition, two of the major components of  “crystallized intelligence” – background knowledge and vocabulary, are significantly correlated with student achievement. However, the assessment and subsequent interventions need to be directed at subject specific background knowledge and vocabulary².

IDEIA's shift and NCLB's mandates that students with disabilities achieve adequate yearly progress (AYP) will increase special education evaluations' emphasis on:

1. State standards and district curriculum as measured by district assessments, state assessments, and the state's cumulative progress indicators (CPI)

2. Curriculum Based Assessments  (CBA) - If a CBA is part of a special education evaluation, strengths and weaknesses related to the general education curriculum would be easy to identify in concrete and measurable terms. Please click on CBA/M tab on the left to access these resources.

3. Functional Behavioral Assessments (FBA) - If the referred student exhibits behavior(s) that interferes with his/her participation in the general education curriculum and program a functional behavioral assessment (FBA) could assist in identifying the causes of these challenging behaviors, the functions they serve, and recommendations to address them. Please click on the FBA tab on the left to access these resources.

In addition, IDEIA provides a number of initiatives, which will increase the emphasis on documented general education interventions to prevent classifications. In fact, these research-based general education intervention can now be used as the criteria to find students eligible for special education and related services, under the disabling condition of "specific learning disabilities" (SLD). This model is called "response to intervention" (RTI), which can be explored further by clicking on the RTI tab on the left.