Screening And Assessment

Every breath one takes, every test one takes, it can feel like educators all always watching students nowadays. In truth, this is more fact than fiction. Modern day educators are constantly on the lookout for ways to keep improving the educational experience, including monitoring students for early signs of learning disabilities. Now, because observation alone is too subjective to warrant a diagnosis, screening and assessment measures have been designed to making diagnosing learning impediments more scientific and detailed. For their part, screening and assessments are two different, yet equally valuable, means of determining where student progress sits on a standard scale; which makes them ideal for collecting practical results; and consequently …show more content…
Indeed, their entire purpose is to examine the results that are submitted, analyze them for patterns, and to provide results to educators for their discretion to action. To give an example, "educators use a diverse array of assessment tools and methods to measure everything from a four-year-old’s readiness for kindergarten to a twelfth-grade student’s comprehension of advanced physics" (Assessment, par. 2). Frankly, having the opportunity to examine students progress is key to examining the effectiveness of the instruction as well as the retention capabilities of the students. Alternatively, screenings are different and primarily “are designed to help identify children who might have developmental delays,” (CDC, par. 11). As a consequence, screenings focus solely on the students, provide results about the students alone, and are more preoccupied with signs of learning blockages that students might have for the express purposes of resolving them. What is more, the CDC remarks how both assessments and “screening can be done by a number of professionals in health care, community, and school settings,” (CDC, par. 1). In other words, the health care and educational professionals and regulatory bodies at large rely on this duo to give a two punch hit to learning obstacles, as well as a two stage boost to providing quality education to each young learner. Conclusively, the …show more content…
In general, this means that the means of testing must produce replicable results and data while using evidence rich means of gathering that data in the process. In specific, when analysts prepare screening or assessment tools, they must first ensure that the tools have a balanced sensitivity (i.e. how well they identify children who do indeed have a developmental delay) and specificity (how well they guard against misclassifying children) (Moodie, et. al, 7). That being said, it is safe to assume that any of today’s screening or assessment measures have undergone rigorous fact and accuracy checking. As a matter of fact, more than 3 national advisory boards, greater than 5 state regulatory statutes, and numerous other professionals require, recommend, endorse, and/or rely on early screening and assessment to look after the wellness of childhood development in this country (ETCACenter). As a result, the utter demand for assessments and screenings from numerous bureaucratic sources, and the need for them to comply with their corresponding standards has refined the reliability of any such data to the point of hardened science and statistic. Likewise, upon hearing that there is an increase of diagnosed cases of developmental disabilities taking place across the country, the members of the Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center concluded