Characteristics of States' Alternate Assessments Based on Modified Academic Achievement Standards in 2008. Synthesis Report 72

Download or read book Characteristics of States' Alternate Assessments Based on Modified Academic Achievement Standards in 2008. Synthesis Report 72 written by Deb Albus and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 2007, Federal No Child Left Behind regulations were finalized that provided states with additional flexibility for assessing some students with disabilities. The regulations allowed states to offer another assessment option, alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards (AA-MAS). States are not required to have this assessment. According to the regulations, this option is for a small number of students with Individual Education Programs (IEPs) who even with appropriate grade level academic instruction are unlikely to reach grade-level proficiency within the year covered by an IEP. The National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) has been tracking and analyzing the characteristics of states' AA-MAS since 2007. This is the second annual update. The previous NCEO report on test design for AA-MAS (Lazarus, Thurlow, Christensen & Cormier, 2007) indicated that five states offered an assessment they considered to be an AA-MAS in 2007: Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. In addition, Maryland indicated it was in process of developing an AA-MAS. In 2008, there were three more states that had an assessment they considered to be an AA-MAS: California, Connecticut, and Texas. As of March 2009, none of the states had successfully completed the U.S. Department of Education's peer review process. As of the publication date, one state (Texas) had received approval. States' AA-MAS's differed in a number of ways from their regular assessments. In 2008, the AA-MAS of all nine states used a multiple-choice format. Some states' assessments also included constructed response or writing prompts. And in 2008, two states included performance-based tasks. Design elements differentiating the AA-MAS from a state's regular assessment included fewer items on the test, removing a distractor, shorter passages, fewer passages, and simplified language. More than half of the states had fewer items per page on the AA-MAS than on the regular assessment. Analysis of states' regular assessment blueprints compared to those of AA-MAS showed some differences in the patterns of emphasis across grade levels. Three appendices are included: (1) State Documents Used in Analysis; (2) AA-MAS Characteristics by State; and (3) Percentages of Items by Elementary, Middle and High School Representative Grade. (Contains 18 tables and 6 figures.) [This report was funded with partial support from the Multi-state GSEG Toward a Defensible AA-MAS and the Alabama GSEG projects.].