Movie Part I

I agree with the speaker that teachers do not diagnose, but collect data and translate it into educational needs.  According to the speaker, a diagnosis is a medical term used by licensed medical practitioners.  The term educational diagnosis is a made up term used to determine eligibility.  Educators address the needs of students and how the disability impacts the ability to access the curriculum.  The most important things that educators can do, is collect data.  For an educational plan to be successful it needs to have goals that are observational and measurable.  In order to see if the child is making progress on those goals, data needs to be taken.  Data cannot be taken in just one environment and in one situation.  Educators need to take data on the child’s ability to generalize across many environments.  This is a benefit that educators have over medical practitioners, the ability to get data across many situations.  

I also agree with the speakers comment that the most important part of the assessment is the person conducting the assessment.  When assessing if a child may have autistic like characteristics an assessor would look at many things but in particular the child’s social, communication, and restrictive/repetitive behaviors.  In education you do not need a clinical or medical diagnosis to get special education services.  In addition, just because a child may have the diagnosis of autism it does not mean sped automatically.  A child may need a 504 for accommodations.  Only when child is not progressing in the curriculum that educational needs need to be addressed.  If the person conducting the assessment isn’t aware of the different options for children with autism they may not be helping.  In addition, the speaker said it nicely by saying that the assessments may not be the best for a child with autism.  Standardized assessments may be limited in terms of the validity and reliability.  Standardized tests may provide objective data about broad functioning, may be able to only give a portion of the standardized test and it is important to cross reference results with observations and interview data to make relevant and point out discrepancies.  Reliability can be an issue due to highly variable performance of skills or it may over or underestimate abilities. 

The most important piece that I took from this video is the importance of multiple sources of assessment including both formal and informal assessment.  The key aspect I remember is when the speaker mentioned a team, triangulated approach to assessment.  What that means is that multiple raters, across multiple environments are used to cross reference data and findings.  The example of the green jellybean was key to this concept.  If the speech therapist had not said that perhaps it was the wrong green jellybean, the whole testing session would have been over with.  However, with the team approach and using everyone’s knowledge of the whole child the correct jellybean was given and testing resumed successfully. 

Assessing any child can be a challenge.  Assessing children with autistic like characteristics can have other challenges.  It is important to use multiple means of assessment and it is very important to be knowledgeable of the characteristics and the assessments for the specific child.  I agree with the speaker that teachers do not diagnose, but collect data and translate it into educational needs, and the most important part of the assessment is the person conducting the assessment