The beginning of the school year can feel chaotic and overwhelming. You’re getting pulled in 1000 directions at the same time- train your paras, finish compliance training, figure out schedules, finish prepping the classroom- all while somehow finding time to assess your students. Beginning of year assessments for special education teachers can feel overwhelming. You may not have the time or staffing to sit down individually with every student for hours of formal testing the way general education teachers get.
Depending on the level of modification your students need, they may or may not be participating in your district’s standard beginning-of-year assessments. But if a particular assessment isn’t appropriate for one or more of your students, that doesn’t mean you don’t need meaningful baseline data to start the year. So, that begs the question: what should I be assessing my students in?
The beginning of the school year is a great opportunity to collect information that will help you make instructional decisions, write future IEPs, communicate with paraprofessionals and related service provers, and understand how your students have changed since the previous school year.
In this blog post, I’m breaking down all things beginning-of-year assessments for special education teachers, and sharing some of my favorite areas to assess at the beginning of the year:
1. Preference Assessments
These are useful tools whenever you have a new student, but they can also be incredibly valuable for students you have known for years. Students’ preferences change. Something that was highly motivating last year may not be motivating this year. New interests develop, and sometimes students return from a break with completely different preferences for books, toys, videos, characters, music, etc. Knowing what your students enjoy gives you and your team valuable information that can be used during instruction, therapy sessions, transitions, reinforcement periods, and paired with less-preferred activities.
Preference assessments can range from very casual observations to more technical processes. You may be familiar with procedures such as Multiple Stimulus With Replacement (MSW) or Multiple Stimulus Without Replacement (MSWO). But a preference assessment doesn’t necessarily have to be complicated to give you goot information.
One of my favorite approaches for beginning of year assessments for special education is a free operant observation. Rather than presenting a predetermined set of choices and requiring the student to select one, you observe the student in a natural environment for a set amount of time. When you pick a time to observe them and you’ve set out a series of potentially preferred items, you can record:
- What items or activities the student interacts with
- How often they interact with each item
- How long they engage with each item
- Whether they return to an item after moving away
- How they interact with the item.
This approach gives the student more freedom and can give you a much broader picture of their interests. For students who are non-ambulatory or have significant mobility challenges, you can adapt this approach by positioning a variety of toys, materials, or activities within the student’s accessible range and observing how they interact with them. The goal isn’t necessarily to create a complicated ranking of preferred items. You are building a menu of potential motivators that your entire team can use. Conduct this periodically throughout the year to make sure your list of preferred items for the student stays up to date with their interests.
2. Collect Regression Data
If your students participated in Extended School Year (ESY), one of your beginning of year assessments for special education should be collection regeression data. Even if a student did not attend ESY, comparing their current performance to their end-of-year performance can give you useful information about regression and recoupment. This is a particularly helpful strategy of assessment when a student is new to you or your district, since you can’t rely on your prior history with the student to ascertain their levels. Start by reviewing your students’ IEP goals and previous progress-monitoring data and figure out:
- What could the student do at the end of the school year?
- What could they do at the end of ESY?
- Do they have a history of regression?
Armed with that knowledge, you can start to work through their IEP goals, looking to see if they can still demonstrate the skill via direct assessment or observation. Mark down any skills the student isn’t demonstrating at the same levels, and what the regression looked like. Many districts ask special education teachers to document how long it takes students to recoup skills after a break- that is much easier to determine when you have data points to begin the year with.
For example, if a student was independently identifying 15 sight words at the end of ESY but returned identifying only 8, you should be checking each week to see how many weeks it took for the student to recoup their learning back to 15 sight words during the fall. If you wait until the next IEP meeting to start thinking about regression and recoupment, it’ll be too late! Collect the information NOW while the transition from summer is still fresh.
3. Assess Access Methods
For students with significant physical disabilities or mobility challenges, beginning-of-year assessment should include more than academic skills. You also need to know how the student is currently accessing their environment. Access needs can change over time. A student’s strength, range of mothion, positioning, visual field, motor control, or preferred method of interacting with materials may look different from one year to the next. You may notice:
- A new side bias
- Changes in reaching ability
- A preference for one hand
- Changes in visual attention
- Difficulty accessing materials positioned in a particular location
- Changes in the amount of assistance needed
- A new preferred access method
You can collect this information in a way similar to preference assessment, through a combination of direct testing and observation. I would also highly suggest you reach out to the families, as they can give you really valuable insights from their time with their child over the summer. This information is incredibly valuable to your paraprofessionals and related service provifers, and can help you identify questions that need to be brought up to your OT, PT, SLP, or assistive technology team.
When assessing access, you typically present a variety of highly preferred items and note several things about what the item and what the student does:
- Where the item is positioned
- How the student reaches for it
- Which hand they use
- Whether they use their eyes to indicate a choice
- Whether they use AAC
- Their range of motion
- How much physical prompting is required
- Whether the student can independently initiate the interaction
- The length of sustained eye contact made with the item
4. Complete a Skills Inventory
Beginning-of-year skills inventories are another excellent way to establish baseline information without creating an enormous formal assessment process. Some students may be assessed for their triannual evaluations using criterion-referenced assessments such as the ABLLS-R, AFLS, or EFL as part of their formal evaluation process. The skills inventories included in these assessments were designed to help you update what the student can do on an ongoing basis. You can establish a baseline in September and then return to the same skills later in the year.
It is important to note with skills inventories that these can be lengthy. You shouldn’t be sitting down with a student with the goal of testing every item in one sitting. Many of these skills, such as play skills or activities of daily living, can be observed by yourself of your paraprofessionals and noted on the skills tracking sheets. Observation is a great way to see if a student is able to perform a certain skills, as you can be doing other things and the student doesn’t have the pressure of a formal sit-down session.
5. Collect ABC Data
Sometimes students return from a long break with changes in behavior. You might notice a behavior that wasn’t present last year, a significant increase in a previously existing behavior, or a change in what the behavior looks like. Rather than immediately assuming you know why the behavior is occurring, collect some data and see if you can spot any patterns. Yes, behavior data can be used as beginning of the year assessments in special education!
As a reminder, ABC stands for:
- A-Antecedent: What happened immediately before the behavior?
- B-Behavior: What exactly did the student go?
- C-Consequence:What happened immediately after the behavior?
A week of consistent data collection may give you enough information to begin to identify patterns about why and when a behavior is occurring, or what is leading to a behavior’s increase.
Of course, ABC data isn’t a magic way to determine the function of a behavior. It gives you information about what is happening around behavior and can help you and your behavior specialist, BCBA, or other team members determine what additional assessments may be needed or what environmental changes should be implemented.
One thing to note about ABC data: it is vital that you use this data collection to describe behaviors objectively. Instead of writing, for example, “Jane was frustrated when it was time to transition,” you would say what you actually observed: “When presented with a direction to stand up and transition away from the blocks to lunch, Jane threw the blocks and made a loud vocalization.” It can be really hard not to assume or imply intent for our students, but we won’t be able to understand them better if we can’t be objective about their behaviors.
6. Language Samples
I love a good language sample, and the beginning of the year is the perfect time to complete one on all of your students. Language samples take a snapshot of your students verbal speech or AAC output and analyzes the function of their utterances, how long each utterance was, and what conditions were present to elicit communication. This information is so valuable to us as teachers because communicating is one of the basic goal areas we are always striving to improve.
This is how you would conduct a language sample:
- Pick a time (it only has to be 5-10 minutes) during the day when the student is most likely to engage in verbal or AAC communication. That could be during lunch, recess, morning meeting, etc.
- Set a timer for 5-10 minutes, and record everything the student says in that period exactly how they say it. For example, if a student has a speech delay and they ask for “more bubbles”, you want to write it exactly how they say it- “mo bubus.”
- If you have time while watching the student, record where the student was, who was interacting with them, what where they playing with, and for each utterance indicate whether it appeared their vocalization was a request, comment, question, etc.
A language sample can accomplish several goals as a beginning of the year assessment for special education teachers. It can help you identify any regression in speech or AAC use. It can show you were a student has improved over the summer and what you need to work on. It can help you identify conditions in your classroom to replicate in order to get the best communication effort from your students. A language sample can also help you identify any issues you should be bringing to your SLP.
Assess Your Students With the Right Tools
Beginning of year assessments for special education teachers can be made much more simple if you have the right tools. I have a data sheet pack that includes different kinds of data sheets that you can use to assess your students in the areas I’ve listed above, including ABC data and language samples for vocal-verbal students and AAC users. You can grab that data pack here. As always, if you have questions about what to do for beginning of year assessments or how to set up any of these assessments, you can email me and I’d love to chat!
