Reflecting A Student's IEP

Today I learned from reflecting our third class session about how in special education it is important when doing assessments and utilizing the results into a student’s IEP (if the student is a special education student), that careful consideration has to be made prior to considering the validity of the assessment that is being used. I learned that essentially if an assessment has a reliability coefficient that is .80 to 1.00 then it would be considered reliable to use. However, if the reliability coefficient is below .80 then it should likely not be used because the validity of the test could be questioned and that would be a grave pitfall in utilizing in part with other sources of evidence in developing a student’s IEP (initial, triennial, …show more content…
work samples) to ascertain the student’s PLOP. If there was any sense of reasonable validity to be questioned from an assessment then I would not want to consider using it for reporting the student’s PLOP as well as the student’s goals in an IEP. If this was done, then it can seriously be misleading in actually determining what the student can or cannot do. Consequently, this could also follow down a path of misconstrued statements for the student’s PLOP (in the areas of strengths, needs, and impact) which in turn would also lead to goals that would be misconstrued. The biggest example that I would see that transpiring would be if an IEP team used results from a high stakes assessment for a student who may have an attention disorder and possibly does not perform well in an environment that was conducive to noise (e.g. ambient noise, students talking/whispering that finish early, class phone ringing, etc.). If such was the case, then it would be expected that