children out of school in america - University of Tennessee Digital ...

1. The use of many kinds of people in assessing
children.
2. The use of many kinds of procedures in assessing
children.
3. A focus on the child's behavior in a variety
of settings.
4. Continuous evaluation.
Priority should be placed on preventing children
from failing rather than on patching them up after
they have experienced chronic failure. Early identification
of potential academic difficulty precludes
more costly, and less effective, attempts to overcome
established problems. Initial emphasis should be to
discover those children who might need special programming
in the future. A major portion of any
assessment plan should be devoted to the screening
and identification of preschool and kindergarten children
who have demonstrable handicapping conditions
(i.e., physical disabilities) and those who
might later experience difficulty in school for other
reasons. Great care should be taken to avoid violations
of privacy and labels that would stigmatize
young children. Screening should be tied to
services which share information with parents to
help them understand their child's condition and enable
them to use appropriate medical or educational
services.
1. The use of many kinds of people in assessing
children.
Children behave differently in different situations.
A valid evaluation of a child's behavior requires information
from as many of the significant and involved
persons in his environment as possible. No
single person or professional group should be in control
of a child's educational assessment. It is equally
important to obtain data from other knowledgeable
people who may come into daily contact with the
child such as parents, school bus drivers, cafeteria
helpers, custodians, clerks, community people and
the child's friends. The parents' role in the assessment
process is crucial. They can provide background
information on their children, become assessors
themselves, and ensure that their children's
behavior has been validly interpreted. .
2. The use of many kinds of procedures.
The evaluation process cannot be limited to only
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one kind of assessment device. And different procedures
are required for different handicaps. Any
evaluation or screening program which is limited
solely to standardized tests is not a sound program.
Standardized instruments, such as intelligence tests,
may be helpful in telling how a child will do in
school-like exercises using the medium of paper and
pencil, but they fail to give information about how
a child functions in situations other than classroom
conditions. They also do not tap the skills of children
who may be competent, but culturally different.
Many factors contribute to school difficulty and all
these factors need to be considered. Thus, assessment
should include direct observation of the child
in a variety of functioning environments (on the
playground, at home, in the gym, as well as in the
classroom); interviews with important and involved
persons in the child's life; evaluation of classwork
(teacher-made tests, homework, workbooks); evaluation
of work done outside school (part-time employment,
hobbies, child-care responsibilities) as
well as standardized academic and psychological
tests. All tests should be administered in the dominant
language of the child.
3. Focus on behavior in a variety of settings.
Any assessment procedure must observe, describe
and evaluate a range of a child's behaviors, not
merely summarize potential in a test score or a label.
o one can "cure" emotional disturbance or "remediate"
mental retardation, but the things children do
which lead people to call them disturbed or retarded
can be significantly changed. Assessment devices
should be designed to measure discrete behaviors
that are important to a child's development - in
school and later out of it. In order to observe behavior
naturally, tests other than paper and pencil
ones must be used. Traditionally a psychologist removes
a child to an artificial setting and measures
his responses to mass-constructed measures. Relying
only on these tests, important information about a
child's normal responses to his environment is
lost. These other environments may in fact be
causing the child's school difficulties. Although it
is more costly and time-consuming, we think direct
observation in settings in school, at home, or at
work is required to make accurate judgments about
a child suspected of needing special education.