English assessments for students (with an ID)
What to test and when...
I often get asked about which assessments, and how to use english assessments for our students with intellectual disabilities. Sadly, there is not one easy solution as there are a number of factors that come into play, including physical disabilities and non-speaking students. I would say that some of this advice could be used for students with learning disabilities too.
My advice is assess/test when you need to, but don’t assess/test because you have to… which is easy to say and do, when your school might be a bit rebellious and not listen to all the assessment ‘advice’ from above.
Truthfully, I am not sure where this obsession with testing in schools has come from and I don’t subscribe to testing/assessing for the sake of testing/assessing that ticks a ‘requirement’ box.
Assessment of students should have three outcomes
To improve teacher practice- so instructional practices can be assessed
To move students towards something - a different level/stage of learning
To screen for potential difficulties/disabilities
Given that every student in my school has an intellectual disability, we use assessments to improve our own instructional practices, and to move students to a different ‘stage’ in their phonics program.
This is our reading/spelling assessment journey.
We have been using the Little Learners Love Literacy (LLLL) program for three years at our school, across foundation to our lower/middle secondary aged students. Over the three years, we have tweaked it to isolate the fundamental instructional practices that have given us the best results in the shortest amount of time. As you can see in the graph below, we are moving students through the lower stages of the program much quicker now, than from when we first started using LLLL in our school.
I unpack these practices in this webinar and Rupert does a fantastic job of summing up my presentation here: Spellcaster Webinar
*For context, our student numbers have grown due to an increase in student enrolments.
We have been using the LLLL Little Learners Assessment of Spelling Skills (LLASS) test to make decisions on when to move students up to the next stage of the LLLL. We use the LLASS because it is more inclusive than the reading assessment, as all students can access it (through writing words through to pointing at the sounds to spell the words using their devices). It also shows us how students are using the GPCs that they have been taught, to spell words. I have seen students move from using random letter strings of known sounds right through to students using vowel digraphs in their spelling assessment. We have learnt a lot about our students reading from these assessments. Another benefit of the LLASS is that we administer the assessment during our phonics sessions, so teachers do not have organise extra time to test their students. Our writing assessment is also built into our term planners, so this lowers the testing load on teachers.
To be clear, for 12 terms we have solely focussed on spelling assessments and writing assessments. This may cause some people to squirm in their seats with horror- ‘What do you mean you haven’t tested comprehension yet?’
This decision, to only administer the spelling (and writing) test was based on implementation science and reading research.
Implementation barriers
These are my observations of why implementation in schools can fail
Too often school leaders try to do too many things at once- think cognitive load of the adults.
In some cases, if teachers do not see immediate results in the new practices (through testing), they fail to trust the process (or research/evidence) and then bring the safety of their own teaching back in- retrofitting conflicting practices/parts do not work.
Too many assessments, while rolling out a new program model, will probably increase the stress for teachers and students alike- people do not like stress.
Not resourcing programs properly- this takes time to find out what is needed- teachers like resources.
So, for the last three years, reading comprehension was taken off the table, which meant our teachers could focus on implementing SSP with fidelity and focus on spelling.
Reading Research
It is well known in the Science of Reading community that decoding is the first step towards reading comprehension, but there are also many other elements that are essential for language comprehension, such as background knowledge, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, language structures etc (see Figure 2 below). We know that both the skills used in word recognition and language comprehension build over time, but- and this is the most important bit- reading comprehension is knowing and using all of the elements in language comprehension and word recognition together, at the same time.
Figure 2: Scarborough’s Reading Rope Model
Note. From “Connecting Early Language and Literacy to Later Reading (Dis) Abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice” by H.S Scarborough, in S. B. Neuman, D.K Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research p. 24), 2001, NY: Guilford Press.
In short, for many students: Mastering reading comprehension is an incredibly complex and long process.
So what does this mean for students with intellectual disabilities and learning disabilities?
Nearing the end of term 2, was the first time throughout the three years, where I have felt confident enough to broach the idea of testing our students using DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills). We chose to use DIBELS to place our students reading skills at a grade level, and for me it was about triangulating our data. We also chose to use DIBELS because it is a very quick assessment and has a lot of evidence/research behind it, which increases its validity of being accurate. Traditionally, these types of assessments have not been considered in special school settings because they grade students against their typical peers, which is inherently a deficit model. Our students are also very aware that they are not reading at the same level as their peers so putting a ‘grade level test’ in front of a student who cannot read is often soul crushing. Testing for testings sake is not a good use of anyone’s time and over-testing students can lead to test anxiety. So, it was incredibly important to weigh up, both the pros and cons of using an assessment like DIBELS on our students. For example, we had only been testing spelling and writing for three years and they were incredibly comfortable with those processes, so would adding in another test potentially cause test anxiety for our students?
Thankfully we were all ready! Our students are consistently showing signs of increased confidence and wellbeing due to their phonics and decodable reader success, so we decided to give it a go.
In order to have fidelity across the school, Kate, our intervention teacher said she was happy to administer them all, so she first trialled it with some of her students, who were accessing intervention. With that success she moved onto our secondary students and then we cancelled all intervention sessions in the last week so she could test as many students as possible. Kate administered the tests with fidelity and kept to the allocated times within the tests.
I do not have all of the DIBELS data, as yet, but I am excited to say that out of the 15 students I do have data for we have
DIBELS Grade 4- 2 students at ‘minimal risk’
DIBELS Grade 3- 6 students at ‘minimal risk’
DIBELS Grade 1- 4 students at ‘minimal risk’
DIBELS Grade K- 1 student at ‘minimal risk’ and 2 students were deemed ‘at risk’
Use DIBELS assessments according to LLLL stages.
Here is a rough estimate of how we have tested our (speaking and minimally speaking) students according to their LLLL stages.
LLLL Stage 4+ to Stage 5
Use DIBELS Benchmark Grade K
LLLL Stage 6 and above
Start with DIBELS Benchmark Grade 1
If at ‘minimal risk’ then stop
If at ‘negligible risk’ continue to test at the next grade level until you achieve ‘minimal risk’ then stop.
If at ‘some risk’ or ‘at risk’ then test at DIBELS Benchmark Grade K
What’s next?
I have had a few questions about if we are using the CUBED assessments with our students. Back in 2021 I trialled the CUBED NLM in my own classroom and I found that it provided a lot of information about how students use narrative structures to aid comprehension, but it was very time consuming. I have thought about how it would benefit our instructional practices, and I feel that for some students it would be very useful and for some students we would be testing for the sake of testing. We are about to start embedding Story Champs into our mentor text model, so maybe it would be more useful then?
But at the moment, I imagine that when we do start using the CUBED assessments it would be within an intervention framework, not across the whole student population. However this is how it could be used from a research perspective.
Use CUBED Narrative Language Measures (NLM) Reading assessments according to DIBELS grade levels
Use the CUBED NLM assessments as diagnostic tool to analyse discrepancies between the DIBELS MAZE results and the other measures in the DIBELS test
For example if the MAZE has markedly lower results than the other scores (NWF, WRF, ORF).
Or use as a diagnostic tool in intervention, where a student has completed the LLLL sequence but has been flagged as needing intervention in comprehension and is at the right age (above grade 2).
We wouldn’t use the CUBED Dynamic Decoding Measures (DDM) if we are using the LLLL spelling assessment and the DIBELS.
But the CUBED DDM could be used as a diagnostic tool for phonics intervention, as it offers more information than DIBELS, which is a screener
Some last thoughts…
At this point in time I do not have any real solutions for non-speaking students other than using spelling and writing assessments as these are more accessible through devices, keyboards, eye-gaze, switches and handwriting. We prefer to focus on spelling and writing assessments because they require the use of more complex higher order skills, which will, in time, support literate and communicative adults, even if they are non-speaking. We have a few students who now write sentences to communicate, and this is much quicker than using an AAC device. As always there are exceptions to the rule, like Deaf students who are Auslan signers, who could potentially complete the comprehension side of reading assessments.
I have also seen some phonics practices that ask students to sort sounds into boxes/tubs, under the guise that they know the sounds through sorting- but these are often just matching activities- we need to move away from these low stakes activities.
Worryingly, I have also seen some schools create assessments that ask students to match pictures to words, to show that they have ‘read’ them. I caution against these types of assessments because we know that some students are very capable of memorising words by ‘sight’ and this does not teach them the principles of decoding and encoding (reading and spelling).
When we conduct assessments with our pre-phonics/early stage 1 learners we ask them to say the sound, or point/eye-gaze to a sound (presenting all 8 stage 1 sounds). We also ask them to identify the Stage 1 characters from the LLLL program by naming them or pointing/eye-gaze to them. We can then ask them to spell some words using the sound cards or handwriting. This is much simpler and shows us their knowledge of the sounds and how they use/manipulate them to make words. I have seen some incredibly complicated assessments from other schools that take a lot of time to create and administer for not much information back.
The old ideas around disability need to be shelved for good.We need to lift the expectations of our students by lifting our teaching practices. We need to assume that most strategies and programs will work for our students, with limited tweaking for accessibility and many, many, many repetitions- this doesn’t mean we need to introduce completely new elements.
When we deviate from the fundamental elements in tried and tested SSP programs, we are no longer teaching SSP.
There is only one process (orthographic mapping) the brain needs to learn to read and spell effectively, so we just need to teach and assess that from the start, especially for our students with an ID- we do not have time to ‘fluff’ around.