Featured Speakers:
- Jessica Arnold, Senior Project Director, Assessment for Learning at WestEd
- Elizabeth Zagata, Program Manager, Special Education Policy and Practice at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 13th session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic: Effective Assessment Systems That Support Positive Outcomes for Students With Disabilities. Our featured speakers today are Jessica Arnold, senior project director for our Assessment for Learning team at WestEd, and Elizabeth Zagata, program manager for the Special Education Policy and Practice team at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres, I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with state, district, and school leaders providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now I’d like to pass the mic over to Elizabeth. Elizabeth, take it away.
Elizabeth Zagata:
Thanks, Danny. And hello, everyone. And thank you all for being here. I am Elizabeth Zagata, special education program manager at WestEd, and I’m joined by Jessica Arnold, senior program director in our Assessment for Learning Content area. Today, we’re gonna be talking about how to create assessment systems that truly work for all students with a particular focus on closing opportunity and outcome gaps for students with disabilities. We’ll be exploring four key strategies that leaders can use to build more inclusive, coherent, and effective assessment systems in their schools and districts. Let me walk you through what we’ll cover today. We’ll start by examining the persistent challenge of inequitable outcomes for students with disabilities and how assessment can be a powerful lever for change. Then we’ll dive into those four key recommendations for leaders on how to build assessment systems that truly support all learners. And we’ll wrap up with practical resources and concrete next steps you can take in your own context. Hopefully by the end of our short time together, you’ll have explored specific approaches for building assessment systems that not only better identify the needs of students with disabilities, but also provide the support they need to succeed. And with that in mind, I’ll pass it over to Jess.
Jessica Arnold:
Thanks, Elizabeth. And thank you, everyone for joining us today. I thought we could get started by anchoring the discussion we have here today with some of the experiences that may have inspired you to join us for this session today. So if you could take a moment just reflect on some of the primary challenges that you see in your work to using assessment data to effectively support the learning of students with disabilities. You can think of what that challenge might look like, what the main challenge facing you is. Please go ahead and share that in the chat, and you can make sure to send that to everyone. I’ll just wait a minute to see if anybody has any responses, really, about the main challenges. Brian, thanks for getting us started. So credibility of the data. There’s a data quality challenge. Absolutely. Students, engaging students in the assessments, identifying and providing support probably around all aspects of the assessment. How is data used to create authentic classroom instruction? Absolutely. What’s the link between assessment data and what happens in the classroom? Accessibility is a huge challenge. And then actually doing something with the results.
All of these themes, I think, you know, and please keep them coming in, really resonate with the stuff that we’re going to be talking about today. So I really appreciate you sharing some of your thinking. Keep these in mind as we consider both the assessment experiences of students with disabilities, as well as dig into some strategies that could better position assessment as a lever for improved learning for students with disabilities. So I’m gonna hand it over to Elizabeth to help ground us in some context about the longstanding gaps in learning outcomes for students with disabilities when we compare that to their non-disabled peers. So, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Zagata:
Thanks, Jess, and thanks, everybody, for sharing your thoughts in the chat. That was really interesting to read, and I hope a lot of this content we’re gonna share will be relevant. So let’s start by taking a look at some data that really illustrate the challenge that we’re facing. When we examine the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, also known as a nation’s report card, we see some concerning gaps. In 2022, fourth graders with disabilities scored 40 points lower in reading and 28 points lower in math compared to their peers without disabilities. And we know these aren’t just numbers. They represent real students facing barriers to academic success. The situation is equally concerning when we look at graduation rates where we see 87% of students in the general population graduate within four years compared to only 71% of students with disabilities. What’s really concerning is that these gaps really haven’t gotten better over the past 25 years. So despite all the work and advocacy that’s happened, we’re just not making the progress that we should be. And this is exactly why we need to consider how our assessment systems can better serve students with disabilities.
So we know these gaps don’t just happen by chance. There’s a reason for them. Students with disabilities are having very different school experiences every day. When we look at who gets access to the general education classes, we see some big differences. While most students with disabilities, about 67%, spend most of their day in regular classrooms, 13% spend less than half their time there. That means they’re missing out on grade-level learning and time with their classmates. We’ve also seen some concerning patterns when it comes to discipline. Students with disabilities make up just about 16% of all students, but they’re facing disciplinary actions more often. So they make up about 25% of students who receive in-school suspensions, 28% of out-of-school suspensions, and 25% of expulsions. They also experience restraint and seclusion more often. So as you can imagine, this creates a troublesome cycle. When students with disabilities are spending less time in regular classrooms and more time being disciplined, they have fewer chances to learn and show what they know, and then that shows up in those concerning assessment results we just talked about. So I’m gonna now turn it back to Jess to talk more about what do we mean when we talk about assessment and assessment systems?
Jessica Arnold:
Thanks, Elizabeth. In my work, I’ve seen that the word assessment can have different meanings in the field. Sometimes I hear it used in what feels like a fairly reductive way, referring primarily to tests and often just specifically to the state summative tests. So in order to keep us on the same page in this discussion, I wanted to share some context about what we mean when we’re talking about assessment here today. We’re taking a bit more of an expansive view. So what we’re talking about is, “Assessment is the process of eliciting evidence of student knowledge and skills, making sense of that evidence, and then using the information to make decisions to improve teaching and learning.” You’ll see our focus here is on getting meaningful evidence of student learning that can help us make good decisions about teaching and learning.
Keeping in mind that each assessment tool and practice is designed for a specific purpose to answer different kinds of questions about learning, so that when we talk about assessment here today, we’re really thinking about the broad range of tools, maybe like an interim assessment or a diagnostic tool, as well as processes like perhaps purposeful questions that you might use as part of the formative assessment process. So that’s what we’re gonna be talking about as we move forward. We often, I think, also in the field tend to consider each different assessment tool and practice individually. However, school and district leaders and even classroom teachers who really want to use assessment to support strong learning outcomes for all students must consider how these assessments work together.
Assessment systems are coherent and effective when they’re intentionally aligned to a shared vision for teaching and learning, when they yield accurate data about student learning, and when the results are consistently used to guide important instructional as well as programmatic decisions. A coherent and effective assessment system is a matter of intentional design. It doesn’t just happen accidentally. And we’re gonna dig into this a bit more as we get to the recommendations in this presentation today. We’re gonna go ahead and pop a link in the chat to a resource that explores in a lot more detail the idea of coherent and effective local systems and what they look like. So as we think about assessment and the power of assessment to improve learning, we all know that, unfortunately, assessment is not always an effective tool for teaching and learning. And this is particularly true when it comes to eliciting the evidence of learning of students with disabilities.
Some of the places that assessment can break down for students with disabilities you’ve already highlighted in the chat when we got started. I heard you all talking about data accuracy, data use, tensions between large-scale assessment and what they experience in the classroom, student engagement. And so some of the things we wanna highlight, I think resonate with what brought you here today. You know, we know that assessments, and particularly for students with disabilities, can be poorly designed, low-quality assessment instruments that are just not getting reliable and valid information about learning. Additionally, assessments, the challenge can be when they’re not used as they were intended to. Maybe they’re used to answer questions for which they just were not designed to yield data, or perhaps with a student population that assessment really isn’t appropriate for. Sometimes assessment tools and practices don’t offer the accessibility features that students with disabilities and all students need to accurately show what they know and can do. I saw that come up in the chat.
Another challenge can be with assessments that ask students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, ways that really don’t reflect the learning experiences that they’ve had in class and that haven’t really, the students haven’t had the scaffolding to translate and bridge their learning in the classroom to that assessment. And finally, even when the assessment is a quality tool, when it’s used appropriately, and it’s yielding meaningful data, when educators and leaders don’t have the information they need, the time, the capacity, or the structural supports to analyze and translate data into practice, then that limits the capacity of assessment to really serve as a lever for change. More than just a missed opportunity to understand and appropriately respond to student learning, we know that poor assessment practices can also harm students. They can increase anxiety, they can result in lost learning time due to over testing, and they can foster damaging and deficit-based messages about their learning and identities. So there’s a real urgency to addressing these challenges.
So now that we’ve thought about this urgency around improving learning outcomes for students with disabilities and started to think about, at least at a high level, the role that assessment can play in supporting learning as well as some of the ways assessments goes wrong for kids with disabilities, let’s focus on what we can do to leverage assessment so that it really does benefit students with disabilities by considering some recommendations for improvement. Before we dig into the four recommendations, I just wanted to give a little bit of context about where these came from. They reflect the shared thinking of a number of colleagues of ours across WestEd. We engaged 13 staff in four focus groups. Our colleagues in these groups represented staff with very deep expertise and experience in a wide range of areas, including assessment, special education, school leadership, instruction, multi-tiered systems of support, and improvement science. And we focused on several inquiry areas, including the greatest challenges and barriers that they saw in assessing students with disabilities, local and state priorities for improvement, promising practices in the field that they have seen, and their own recommendations for creating coherent assessment systems that really include and respond to the needs of students with disabilities.
We used a standardized protocol of questions across all groups. And three authors, me, my friend here, Elizabeth, and our wonderful colleague, Susan Hayes, engaged in a qualitative analysis and we synthesize their thinking into a brief, which I think we’ll share with you in the chat now and again at the end of the session. So we’re gonna dig into those recommendations that resulted from that inquiry and which are featured in a lot more depth in that brief. So I’m gonna hand it back to Elizabeth to dig into the recommendations.
Elizabeth Zagata:
Great. Thanks, Jess. So our first recommendation is to foster a culture of high expectations and inclusion for students with disabilities. Even the best assessment tools will not help if we’re not setting high expectations for what students with disabilities can achieve. Sometimes even without realizing it, our school cultures can limit what we think students are capable of, and that shows up in outcomes no matter how good our assessments are. So before we dive into improving our assessment systems, we really need to take an honest look at our own assumptions. When we start there, when we really believe that all students can succeed, that’s when our assessment improvements can then make a real difference. So leaders need to really push back against the low expectations that can spread throughout a school or a district. Our focus group experts really emphasize that students with disabilities are general education students first. Hopefully you all subscribe to that mantra.
And they need to learn in environments that reflect this belief. And we know that when expectations are low, instead of assessments helping us see what students can do, we often use that information to just confirm what we think they can’t do. We also wanna think about access. And when we say access, we’re not just talking about physical placement. Access is about meaningful participation in grade-level content. Remember those numbers we shared earlier where just over half of students with disabilities spend most of their day in regular classrooms, but 13% spend less than half their time there. So students with disabilities need access to both the general education environment and grade-level standards-based instruction. And then our assessments need to connect to the general education curriculum that students are actually learning. And this means making sure that our assessment tools align with the personalized instruction in students’ individualized education plans or IEPs.
And then speaking of IEPs, every student with a disability is different. So we really can’t use a one-size-fits all approach. Students across, and even within the same disability categories, have very different needs and strengths. And when we don’t pay attention to those differences, we end up with interventions that don’t work and assessment results that don’t tell us what students actually know. So our assessment tools, they need to recognize that students might show their knowledge in different ways. And then finally, under this recommendation, we need to shift from primarily focusing on what students can’t do to celebrating what they can do. This means recognizing and building on students’ strengths, knowledge, and experiences that they bring with them. And instead of just testing students, we really wanna use assessment to better understand how each student learns and then support what they need.
Our second recommendation is to foster collaborative systems. So I think Jess made references before, but we know, too often, general education and special education operate in separate worlds. That’s in many spaces. And this means students with disabilities and their teachers often get left out of important decisions that affect them. So for example, general education leaders may pick assessments without thinking about students with disabilities. And special education leaders may choose tools without connecting to the regular education curriculum. And then when we do that, the assessment data stays separate instead of being shared and discussed together. And this separation can cause problems that ripple through everything else we do. So if we’re thinking about how to dismantle those silos, we wanna intentionally include special education expertise in all assessment decisions.
So for example, don’t just invite special education staff to special education meetings. Make sure those people are included in broader strategic planning, assessment decisions, and evaluation. And by prioritizing that collaboration, we can make sure that every assessment decision considers students with disabilities from the start. This includes evaluating, designing, selecting, and administering assessment tools, and then analyzing those results. So we wanna make sure that we consider accessibility and appropriateness from our initial planning. And then finally, we need to address fragmented assessment experiences. So for example, too often intervention data sits in special education files instead of being shared with all the students’ teachers. So as an alternative, we can create data teams where special education and general education teachers actually work together to review and use those results. I’m now gonna pass it back to Jess to talk about our remaining two recommendations.
Jessica Arnold:
Thanks. So our third recommendation is to address assessment systematically. We’ve talked about this a little bit. But while doing that, making sure to center the experiences of students with disabilities within the assessment system. Leaders make the most of assessment when they move past thinking about assessment simply as a collection of disconnected tools. Like we talked about earlier, assessment is most effective when it functions as part of a coherent system that supports student learning. Strong assessment systems are intentionally cultivated and improved over time. This process starts by comprehensively auditing, evaluating, and then using that information to improve the assessment tools that students are currently experiencing across the school year, with a specific attention to the assessment experiences of students with disabilities. Because students with disabilities often experience a higher volume of specialized assessments, it’s very important to include all students in the audit process and the investigation into the accessibility of each assessment.
A meaningful assessment evaluation reviews how evidence of learning is actually used. It’s not just about the tools, but what how that information yielded is used to inform decision making. This process is designed to answer questions about assessment, like what to keep, what to stop, what might be missing, and what do we have in place that we need to offer more support for. It also requires an investment in educator assessment literacy by providing professional learning that builds common understandings of the purposes and appropriate use of all assessment tools and practices among both general and special educators. All educators should be able to select, design, and improve high-quality assessment tools and practices that meet the needs of their students. And this includes students with disabilities. Finally, when honing your assessment system and ensuring that it does serve all students as we’ve been talking about, particularly students with disabilities, it’s just not a one-and-done process.
Leaders can focus on continuous improvement to constantly reflect on the assessments and identify where things may be underused, redundant, unnecessary, or just problematic. I’m gonna move on to our final recommendation. And this one is really about creating conditions that support effective data use practice among the people who need it, particularly classroom educators and people that are using data to make programmatic decisions, this was something that came out in the chat, was challenges around data use. The quality of an assessment, as we’ve said before, is meaningless if the data generated are not used to improve teaching and learning. And leaders can play a key role in promoting a culture of inclusive and effective data use. More than simply setting aside time, leaders can create these conditions by also making sure to implement routines, norms, and expectations that support inclusive data use, and puts the attention on students with disabilities. They can ensure that data teams consistently include and empower special educators, like Elizabeth talked about earlier, and that data analysis considers data that comes through special education and general education programs.
Leaders can provide all educational partners with support to develop their data literacy skills in ways that specifically relevant to their own roles, helping them effectively understand, prioritize, and interpret data from multiple assessment sources, again, including both special education and general education data, and including both individual achievement data and programmatic data. Finally, leaders can also cultivate the expectation that decisions about learning for students are made based on assessment data, but also other important data like opportunity to learn data, data reflect the lived experiences of students, and student and family voice data. I’m gonna turn it back to Elizabeth to reflect back on some of our key takeaways before we wrap up today.
Elizabeth Zagata:
Thanks, Jess. And there was a great question in the Q&A about also including the expertise of those who work with students who are multilingual learners. And I wanna thank you for highlighting that really important consideration because we know there are students who receive services through multiple domains. And so yes, absolutely. First of all, that usually leads to even more assessments for those kids and absolutely, you know, our recommendation would be to make sure that all of those service providers are engaged in those shared conversations and decision making when it comes to assessments. So thank you for that. As we wrap up, we want to give you three things that you can think about starting to do right away. First would be to really take an honest look at your current assessment system. What are students with disabilities actually experiencing over a full year? How many assessments are they taking? How is the data being used, and where are the gaps? And this often reveals tools that aren’t helpful or might even be getting in the way.
Second, use what you learn to make targeted improvements. So we’re not just looking for a bunch of good individual assessments, we need all the pieces to work together. So make sure your assessments actually connect to your teaching goals and give you information that you can use to help your students. And then finally, as we’ve talked about, invest in your teachers. Both general and special education teachers, and, of course, teachers who serve multilingual learners need to understand how to use assessment data effectively to support all students. So these strategies we’ve shared today can help you build systems that truly work for every student. Before we leave, we just wanna make sure that you have access to dig deeper into these concepts.
As Jess referenced before, we did create a comprehensive resource, it’s open access, called Leading Inclusive, Coherent, and Effective Assessment Systems that expands on everything we’ve discussed today. You can access it right now by scanning the QR code on your screen with your phone, or if you prefer, we just posted the direct link in the chat. But this resource provides detailed guidance on each of the four recommendations we covered, along with practical examples and additional considerations for implementation. We encourage you to share it with your leadership team or colleagues who would benefit from this information. And for those of you who want to continue this assessment learning journey, we’re offering a related webinar next week called Building Effective Assessment Systems Aligned with LEA Teaching and Learning Goals that takes you through the practical steps of implementation.
And then as Jess mentioned before, we also have another comprehensive resource on the key characteristics of coherent, effective local assessment systems that provides a detailed framework you can use to evaluate and improve your current systems. This resource includes assessment tools and checklists that will help you put today’s recommendations into practice immediately. You can find information about both of these on WestEd.org as well as the links in the chat. As always, please feel free to reach out to us directly if you have questions as you begin implementing these strategies in your own context. And with that, I will turn it back to Danny to wrap things up.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, Elizabeth and Jessica, for a great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. Feel free to reach out to Elizabeth and Jessica via email if you have any questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Elizabeth at [email protected]. And you can reach Jessica at [email protected]. And if you’d like to learn more about WestEd’s Comprehensive Assessment Solutions, visit us online at WestEd.org/assessment-solutions. And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics including literacy assessment, early math, professional learning communities, and more. During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. For more information about our Leading Together webinar series, visit us online at WestEd.org/leading-together-2025.
And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at WestEd.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very much. We’ll see you next time.