Use of Curriculum-Based Measurement in Identifying Students with Disabilities

Abstract

The problem of overrepresentation of minority students in special education, particularly in special classes for students with mild mental retardation, has become a stimulus for scrutiny, debate, and important developments in special education.Overrepresentation has resulted in placement-bias 'litigation (Larry P. v. Riles, 1979/1986;Marshall et al. v. Georgia, 1984/1985; S-1 v. Turlington, 1986), which has prompted discussion and controversy over the process by which children are identified for special education (M.Polloway, 1985;Reschly, 1984Reschly, , 1988;;Snow, 1984) as well as the quality and value of those very services (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995).In tum, this discussion and controversy has led to definitional and procedural modifications in disability categories (American Association on Mental Retardation, 1992; Grossman, 1977 Grossman, , 1983) and corresponding epidemiological changes in the mild mental retardation and learning disability populations (Hodapp, 1995;Polloway & Smith, 1983;Reschly, 1988).The 1982 National Research Council's (NRC's) analysis of the problem of minority students' overrepresentation set the stage for much of the focus, tone, and substance of this activity.In the NRC report Heller, Holtzman, and Messick (1982) reformulated the problem of over- representation from one of discovering how to reduce disproportionality to determining the conditions under which inequality constitutes inequity of treatment.As described by Messick (1984), disproportion signifies inequity only when children are unduly exposed to classification because they receive poor quality general education, are assessed invalidly for special education, or receive an ineffective special education that hinders educational progress.Over the past decade this reformulation of the problem has fostered calls for eligibility decision making that focuses on treatment validity-whereby the value of an assessment process is judged by its capacity to inform, foster, and document treatment effectiveness ( e.g., Reschly, 1988;Reschly & Grimes, 1995; Witt & Gresham, 1985).One alternative assessment method frequently nominated in these calls for change is Curriculum-Based Measurement (e.g.,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.