Measured Progress Participates in New Federal Grants   

Measured Progress is pleased to be a partner in two new federal grant projects and to serve as advisor to two others. Our organization will be among the participants in a new round of grants for Enhanced Assessment Instruments (EAI), awarded by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) in October of 2004. The purpose of the program is to enhance the quality of assessment instruments and systems used by state DOEs for measuring the achievement of all students. In their grant application, the five funded states successfully addressed the grant priorities of further developing accommodations and alternate assessments, collaborative efforts, and dissemination. The new awards range from $723,000 to $1,058,000 for the eighteen-month projects. 

The first, led by New Hampshire, addresses the issue of technical criteria for alternate assessments, beginning with an exploration of “Knowing what students with significant cognitive disabilities know.” Jim Pellegrino of the National Research Council’s Committee on the Foundations of Assessments is facilitating discussions regarding the assessment triangle of cognition, observation, and interpretation and its influence on validity. What does a valid assessment look like for students with significant cognitive disabilities? A nationally renowned panel of experts in measurement, assessment, academic content, policy, and special education will consider this question and provide recommendations to states that need to demonstrate the technical quality of their alternate assessments. Their recommendations will result in a technical report prototype, which will be tried in four Measured Progress client states: New Hampshire, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Mexico. Because each state has a different model of alternate assessment, it is anticipated that the content of a technical report will be refined as the criteria are applied and states examine the evidence they have. 

Rhode Island won a second Enhanced Assessment award on behalf of the New England Compact, (Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont), to reach “students in the gap” through Web-based task module assessments. These students are often described as having severe learning disabilities or moderate cognitive disabilities but do not qualify for an alternate assessment. The grant will gather more information on this population in order to design an assessment that better meets their needs. Measured Progress will assist the states to develop the prototype assessments, focusing on eighth-grade mathematics. The goal for the assessments is to allow students who consistently perform poorly on regular assessments to better demonstrate what they know and can do by providing an alternative to an on-demand paper-and-pencil test. 

A third Enhanced Assessment project was awarded to West Virginia, to be advised by Assessing Special Education Students (ASES), which includes representatives from Measured Progress. ASES is one of the Council of Chief State Officers (CCSSO) State Collaboratives on Assessment and Student Standards (SCASS). Project D.A.A.T.A. (Developing Alternate Assessment Technical Adequacy), has a very practical focus. It is designed to support state efforts to prepare for and respond to NCLB peer reviews. The project focuses directly on alternate assessments as a part of state comprehensive assessment systems, including accommodations and modifications. At each ASES SCASS meeting from January 2005 to May 2006, Gerald Tindal and Patricia Almond from the University of Oregon will facilitate discussions on one topic per meeting, addressing content validity, generalizability, reliability, criterion and predictive validity, and consequential validity. The final products will include a handbook for states, exemplary instruments, and examples of reporting systems. 

Finally, Measured Progress was invited to provide technical expertise to an Office of Special Education Programs Research on Accessible Reading Assessments grant. The goal of this project is to design and develop an accessible reading proficiency assessment that is diagnostic, based on components of reading, and aligned with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. The outcomes of the project will be: (1) a definition of the construct of reading proficiency that can be used as a basis for research and test development; (2) a program of research on the assessment of reading proficiency that will address issues of accessibility, validity, and comparability for students with reading disabilities; (3) guidelines and principles for making large-scale reading assessments more accessible for students with disabilities; and (4) the design, development, and field testing of an accessible, diagnostic reading assessment. 

Measured Progress values the opportunities we have through these innovative efforts to share our expertise and to help advance the field’s collective knowledge about difficult and challenging assessment issues. Our recent experiences in three previous grants (the Alternate Assessment Collaborative led by Colorado; the Mountain West Assessment Consortium led by Utah; and the New England Compact led by Rhode Island) make us appreciate the strength of collaborative work and the positive impact it can have on teaching and learning.

Sue Bechard