Accountability for All Students: Kentucky's Alternate Portfolio Assessment for Students with Moderate and Severe Cognitive Disabilities

Abstract

One of the keys to ensuring high expectations for all students is the requirement for inclusive measures of educational accountability. Recognizing this need, Congress enacted Title II, National Education Reform Leadership, Standards, and Assessments, calling for the development of state assessment systems that fully include all students, as a major component of the 1994 Goals 2000: Educate America Act. At present, Kentucky is the only state in the nation that fully includes all students within a statewide educational assessment and accountability system. Students with moderate and severe cognitive disabilities participate in Kentucky's assessment system via the Alternate Portfolio. This article describes the development of Kentucky's alternate assessment, including the content and scoring standards for the Alternate Portfolio. Specific examples of entries at each grade level (4th, 8th, and 12th) are given as well. Initial implementation data, including reliability, validity, and instructional impact measures, are presented. Finally, critical issues in the development of alternate statewide assessments are discussed, with recommendations for future research efforts in this area.

An Introduction to Alternate Assessment

“…While these changes in instructional practices and communication outcomes for students with significant disabilities were not necessarily the result of the alternate assessment, they were supported by that assessment. Turner, Baldwin, Kleinert, and Kearns (2000) and Kleinert et al (1997) found a moderately strong correlation between alternate assessments scores and the implementation of best practices for students with significant disabilities at the school or classroom level. Thus, high student scores tended to be a reflection of effective instructional programming.…”

“…At least one state, Indiana, has designed a statewide electronic portfolio for alternate assessments (Bennett & Davis, in press). Essential to any of these methods of assessment is a reliable method for scoring, which may prove especially difficult for portfolio assessments (see Kleinert, Kearns, & Kennedy, 1997).…”

Portfolios in Large-Scale Alternate Assessment Systems: Frameworks for Reliability

“…However, a goal of several states' alternate assessment systems, par, ticularly those using portfolios (Kleinert, et al, 1997;Kleinert & Thurlow, 2001), is to capture the educational opportunities provided to students with significant disabilities. Homogenizing these opportunities is not likely to provide students with highly diverse needs access to richer educational experiences.…”

What We Know and Need to Know about Alternate Assessment

“…Kleinert et al (1997) proposed that "one of the keys to ensuring high expectations for every child is requiring that all students be included in measures of educational accountability" (p. 88). Kentucky was the first state to realize that "all means all" and to identify a way to include students with the most significant disabilities in its accountabil- Kleinert, Garrett, et al (2002) Relationship between AA scores and postschool outcomes…”