Learning Opportunities

Classroom teachers, special education teachers (resource, LST, LAT, etc.) and school administrators are often faced with understanding a variety of standardized child assessment data.  There can be a lot of numbers - from standard scores to T scores, to percentile ranks and on and on…. But how do educators understand these numbers and use them to guide real-life educational interventions to benefit children?

Assessment data can come from many sources.  Some is school-generated (including various reading, arithmetic, spelling and written expression scores).  Some comes from school psychologists, and more can come from diagnostic centers, SLPs, PT/OTs, behavior specialists and so on…

In this two-day in-service we will:

• Look at simple but very accurate ways to compare test scores - seeking practical ways to look at possible strengths and weaknesses in a child's scores. 

• We will look at the differences between "inter-individual" and "intra-individual" scores and how knowing those differences help us understand the assessment scores.
• Examine several sets of child assessment results brought by Dave - so that we can practice examining test scores.  These will be data sets generated with real children seen by Dave (no names or identifiers of course).
• Throughout the emphasis will be on "making sense" of assessment data with an eye to better understand the needs of the child as reflected in the data.
• We will look at some practical ways to take data (along with other critical information such as classroom observations, the child's educational record, what teachers are seeing on a daily basis) and developing from it practical learning plans.
• On the second day of these sessions, participants are asked to bring along some sample "files" of children they work with (a file is not required, but everyone is invited to bring one). We will carefully honor confidentiality about the child, but will in small groups and then as a whole group see if we can understand the test data and come up with ideas about how to assist the child.  This will allow us to practice what we learned on day one of the sessions.

This learning opportunity is being offered through curriculum implementation funding from Alberta Education.