The author used the "North Caroling Alternative Assessment Protocol" (NCAAP) for her research. Research of course is conducted some time before it is published, so it seems likely that the NCAAP has been modified since this research to include academic areas, but Courtade-Little's research may be of little help to teachers concerned with demonstrating academic achievement in alternative ways.
The third article looked at ways to evaluate academic gains in alternative ways, particularly by the use of "running records." Olsen (1999) notes that "Students who will participate in alternate assessments typically are not working toward a regular high school diploma...." This statement might be of great concern, since students with dyslexia who have had great difficulty reading have been able, with the right supports, to complete a high school diploma and even college. The idea that only very severe disabilities interfere with good performance on group achievements may not be an accurate one. However, Olsen looked at a variety of assessment approaches including recollection, record review, and testing. He defined recollection as something that could be performed with an interview or using some kind of rating scale. These observations would of course be made by someone very familiar with the student within the school setting. Record review could include information from school cumulative records, databases, accumulated examples of work, anecdotal reports and records from non-school settings. The author noted that without some kind of standardization for gathering this information, it would be hard to quantify the information gathered in any systematic way. The author also noted that testing, whether standardized or norm-references, often did not demonstrate the abilities and knowledge of students with significant learning problems.
Olsen (1999) offered the opinion that alternative evaluations should still be referenced to the curriculum being taught. If this standard is applied, then alternative assessment...
However, he noted the great difficulty of using artificial test methods to measure such things as the ability to function in society, and suggested that this would be a good place to use authentic assessment.
The issue not addressed in any of these studies involves the cumbersome nature of these alternative assessments. While teachers can keep a running record of skills worked on, degree of accuracy of response, etc., such records don't indicate what kind of prompts the students might have been given in order to complete the tasks satisfactorily (Delzell et. al., 2003). If a student needs prompts to perform a skill, it could be argued that the student has not really mastered it yet. In addition, some authentic assessment is cumbersome and time-consuming in a time when more and more demands are being placed on teachers' time. If a student is supposed to learn to use public transportation, with progress measured by authentic assessment, someone has to get on the bus with the student and observe how well he or she can negotiate that process. All three papers give the strong impression that over a span of years, educators are still struggling with the concept of alternate assessment and how to best evaluate the progress of students for whom group achievement tests can tell us little.
Bibliography
Courtade-Little, Ginevra. 2005. "The impact of teacher training on state alternate assessment scores." Exceptional Children, March.
Delzell, Lynn Ahlgrim; Algozzine, Robert; Browder, Dianne M.; flowers, Claudia; Karvonen, Meagan; and Spooner, Fred. 2003. "What We Know and Need to Know about Alternate Assessment." Exceptional Children, January.
Olsen, Ken. 1999. "Putting Alternate Assessments Into Practice: What to Measure and Possible Sources of Data." Exceptional Children, December.
