Alternative Assessment Methods for Special Education Students
This paper examines alternative assessment methods for students with disabilities, reviewed in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act's requirement that all students demonstrate measurable learning. Drawing on three peer-reviewed articles from Exceptional Children, the paper evaluates portfolio assessment, anecdotal records, running records, and authentic assessment as alternatives to group achievement tests. It discusses the strengths and limitations of each approach, including issues of standardization, quantification, and teacher burden. The paper also considers how well these methods address academic progress versus life-skills domains, concluding that educators continue to struggle with identifying consistent and meaningful ways to assess students for whom traditional tests provide little useful information.
- Introduction: Assessment Under No Child Left Behind: NCLB context and need for alternate assessment
- Portfolio Assessment and Its Limitations: Portfolio methods, rubrics, and their shortcomings
- Teacher Training and Alternate Assessment Outcomes: Courtade-Little's research on training and scores
- Running Records and Curriculum-Referenced Evaluation: Olsen's review of recollection, records, and testing
- Practical Challenges Across All Alternative Methods: Shared burdens and unresolved gaps across studies
- Conclusion: Ongoing educator struggle with alternate assessment
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What makes this paper effective
- Synthesizes three distinct research articles in a logical sequence, building toward a broader critical argument rather than simply summarizing each source in isolation.
- Maintains a critical voice throughout — acknowledging the contributions of each study while identifying concrete gaps, such as the absence of academic domains in Courtade-Little's four-domain framework.
- Closes with an original practical critique (the "bus example") that grounds the discussion in classroom reality and is not borrowed from any single cited source.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative literature synthesis: rather than treating each article as a standalone summary, the author threads a consistent evaluative question — "How well do these methods actually measure student progress?" — across all three sources. This technique allows the paper to build an argument incrementally while remaining grounded in cited evidence.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with policy context (NCLB), then moves through three article reviews in roughly chronological order (2003, 2005, 1999 publication dates). Each review includes a summary, a critical assessment, and a connecting observation. The final section steps back from individual articles to identify a shared limitation — the cumbersome nature of authentic assessment — that none of the reviewed studies fully resolved. This structure moves from specific to general, ending on a synthesis rather than a simple restatement.
Introduction: Assessment Under No Child Left Behind
Alternative forms of assessment have taken on new importance since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) required that schools demonstrate students are learning. While the standard assessment for most schools is some form of group achievement test, some students do not perform well on such tests, making them a poor measure of individual progress. Other students have special needs, and their progress must be evaluated differently than that of children with no impediments to learning.
Delzell et al. (2003) examined alternative forms of assessment and evaluation, noting that in the past, children with learning difficulties were simply excluded from testing. However, current special education law requires that their learning be evaluated in some form. Their study also looked at requirements to tie these assessments to state standards.
Portfolio Assessment and Its Limitations
One of the most widely discussed methods for alternative assessment is the portfolio. A portfolio is simply a collection of information that demonstrates, as completely as possible, how a student is performing as a learner. It may include goals from an Individualized Education Program (IEP), documentation of progress toward those goals, anecdotal notes, work samples, and even video recordings of the student engaged in schoolwork (Delzell et al., 2003). The authors examined when a portfolio might be used, as well as methods for quantifying the evaluation, such as through the use of a rubric.
The authors noted a variety of difficulties associated with portfolio use, including the possibility that the contents could be too vague to demonstrate whether a student was actually progressing. They also observed that there is no evidence that the use of portfolios for evaluation has raised expectations for the students involved.
This article provided a thorough overview of the issues involved but did not point to concrete solutions to the problems that arise when using portfolio assessment or other alternative forms of evaluation.
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