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Portfolio Assessment and Special Education Students

Special education teachers constantly ask questions like these as they use ongoing assessments to make decisions about instruction for their students. Teachers make hypotheses, collect data, and test their hypotheses about optimal instructional programs. In a test-teach-test cycle. we continually evaluate the effects of our instruction to ensure that students are progressing at acceptable rates. We assess students through criterion-referenced assessment, basal mastery tests, curriculum-based assessment, and other informal and formal measures. An emerging trend in curriculum and instruction suggests that we can no longer prepare students fully for their adult lives but rather need to help students understand that learning is a lifelong process. We need to teach students how to learn and to think about how that learning occurs. Through such instruction, students learn with a sense of ownership as they are involved in decision making in partnership with their teachers. New ideas for assessment are emerging as well-such as portfolio assessment. Special educators may discover that this is a useful tool used in conjunction with their teaching goals (Vavrus. 1990). As reform in general education continues, we need to keep abreast of new assessment practices.