Educational Assessment of the Handicapped Child

Symposium on Habilitation of the Handicapped Child

Educational Assessment of the Handicapped Child John T. Guthrie, Ph.D.*

OVERVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT Although the profession of education is charged with the responsibility of rehabilitating many handicapped children, this profession has not traditionally been involved in the assessment and evaluation of these children. Evaluation has traditionally been in the hands of physicians and psychologists. As William Cruickshank 12 has stated, the educational evaluation either has been ignored completely or has taken the form of a psychological evaluation which may not be an appropriate basis for development of suitable educational procedures. Since the treatment of children with developmental disabilities is shared to a great extent by educators, the educational assessment of these children should occupy a central place in the interdisciplinary evaluation process. Developing an effective educational assessment depends on an accurate model of the psychological characteristics of children and the pedagogical needs of teachers. It is natural that physicians should use a medical model to understand educational processes. However, medical models will be appropriate in some instances and not appropriate in others. From the medical orientation, a developmental disability is a symptom of an organic dysfunction. That is, the poor language development of a child with Down's syndrome is regarded as the manifestation of the fundamental problem which is the chromosomal anomaly characteristic of these children. The poor language development is the symptom rather than the basic defect in the child. This model is very powerful in medicine and there is a long tradition of managing the child in terms of the basic defect rather than the symptom which is a manifestation of the defect. The medical approach to developmental disabilities which includes the observation of symptoms and the analysis of basic defects does not hold in the field of education. In education there is no distinction between the symptom and the defect. A developmental disability is a capability which the child has not developed and which society regards as suf"Assistant Professor of Special Education in Pediatrics, The Johns Hopkins University; Director of Special Education, The John F. Kennedy Institute

Pediatric Clinics of North America- VoL 20, No.2, February 1973

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ficiently important to merit educational and rehabilitative efforts. For example, the failure of a trainable mentally retarded child to acquire normal expressive language is not regarded as a symptom. The poor language is itself the disability and it is treated with direct educational effort. Reading disability which takes the form of poor word recognition is not a symptom of a basic visual perception defect. There are many types of visual perception and they are largely independent of each other. Children with reading difficulties often cannot read lower case letters, although they can read upper case letters fluently. Consequently this perceptual problem is limited to lower case letters and cannot be generalized to other visual stimuli. Since a child's perceptual, cognitive, and language skills appear to be extremely specific and independent, the quest for basic defects has not been fruitful. An educational assessment must focus on those abilities which are necessary for the child's cognitive and social growth. The educational maxim is: measure the behaviors and abilities that you wish to develop; embark on a treatment program to improve these abilities. The basic function of an educational evaluation is to obtain information which will bear on the remediation of the child's deficits. First, this information must be obtained with the child's probable adult level of functioning serving as a backdrop for the evaluation. Clearly the education required for a child to become literate and independent is very different from that required for a child to become toilet trained and ambulatory but not independent. Thus different kinds of information must be obtained, depending upon the possible destiny of the child. Second, the general learning characteristics of the child must be assessed. These will include his intelligence, social skills, perseverance and cooperation. Third, the child's specific strengths and weaknesses with respect to his probable line of rehabilitation must be accurately measured. These will include social, academic, language, self care, and vocational skills. Fourth, it is vital to establish the conditions which are necessary for learning and rehabilitation to occur in the child being assessed.

ADULT EXPECTATIONS Since the educational assessment must be viewed against a backdrop of the possible adult functioning of handicapped children, the probable adult achievements of four different types of children will be described. These four types will include children who would be described as trainable, educable, cerebral palsied, and learning disabled. Children who are identified as trainable mentally retarded are those who manifest intelligence quotients of 30 to 50. These children will usually be dependent upon others in adulthood, and will not pursue an occupation with great success or for any prolonged periods. Consequently, the broad goals for these children will be those which will provide the minimum skills needed for living at home or in sheltered communities. Generally the areas of skill include self help, socialization, and oral communication.16 Thus, although these children will be economically and

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socially dependent upon society, they should be taught the psychological skills necessary for simple communication and personal self care. The adult development of trainable children is well illustrated by Delp and Lorenz. 13 These authors followed 84 pupils who had IQs below 50 and were enrolled in special classes in a large mid-western city. At the time of the follow-up, the average age was 22 years. Of the original population, 41 children were living at home, 25 were in residential placement, 9 were deceased, and 9 had moved out of the vicinity. Of those children who were living at home, the majority were accepted by the community and useful members of the household. They were able to go to restaurants, make simple purchases and attend popular entertainment. Only two of the original group had held full time jobs and these were simple unskilled positions. A second study paints a slightly more favorable picture of the adult life of trainable children. Saenger followed 2640 adults who were enrolled in classes for trainable children in New YorK City.36 Saenger found that two thirds of the graduates were living at home in contrast to one half found by Delp and Lorenz. Also a larger proportion (25 per cent) were gainfully employed in the community. Most of these employments were offered by relatives and friends. The IQs of those who were successfully employed were usually in the 50s. The goals for educable mentally retarded children are much different from those for the trainable. The educable mentally retarded are usually thought to have intelligence quotients between 50 and 75, which indicates that they are able to learn at about half to three fourths the rate of normal individuals. The broad objective for educable mentally retarded children is similar to that for normal children. Most of the children in the educable category will marry, raise children, hold jobs successfully and become independent socially and economically.16 The typical school program for these children requires education in areas which might include (1) oral and written communication, (2) interpersonal relations and social activities, (3) management of money and simple arithmetic, (4) understanding simple science concepts, (5) earning a living, (6) housekeeping, (7) travelling on private and public transportation, (8) using leisure time, (9) avoiding hazards, (10) personal hygiene, and (11) enjoying esthetic artifacts and activities. The success of the educable mentally retarded to make social and occupational adjustments is documented by Goldstein et alP After an exhaustive review of the literature, he concluded that: (a) the large majority of educable adults have successfully adjusted to community life; (b) the retarded adults were inferior to normal individuals in interpersonal relations and community interaction; and (c) most retarded adults held jobs below the skilled level. In addition, Baller, Charles, and Miller compared 206 mentally retarded adults with 206 normal controls who had IQ's between 100 and 120. 2 The groups were matched on the basis of sex, age, and IQ's during school age. Although the retarded group were slightly lower on a number of criteria of social adjustment, the great majority of the retarded group were gainfully employed, entirely self supporting and had only few more legal violations than the normal group.

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It is the social adjustment of educable adults rather than the occupational competence which represents a threat to their social and economic independence. The most common reason for the termination of a job is sociaP2 Such problems as disregard of rules, punctuality, proper dress, and general deportment all pose obstacles for the educable adult. Ridicule and teasing from co-workers also caused stress on many adults which prompted their departure. A considerable amount of counselling with parents, friends and relatives is necessary in order to maintain the employment of many educable adults. It is clear that the goal stated at the outset of this section for educable adults can be achieved readily with the services and facilities available. The special education of children with cerebral palsy is particularly difficult because of the complexity of the involvement. Furthermore, the adult goals of this group may vary drastically, owing to the range of severity of this disability. During the school age years, the children may be required to adjust to normal school, a special school, a residential institution, or a home environment to which a teacher comes periodically. The major therapeutic professions in this area are physical therapy, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. However, if the disability is limited, occupational and communicative skills may readily be developed, since many of these children are of normal or above normal intelligence. Social adjustment for the cerebral palsied is particularly critical; however with appropriate schooling to provide the occasion for social interaction, a majority of men and women get married. In a study by Denhoff, about two thirds of a group of 100 men and women who had attended school together were married in adulthood.14 However, it is well known that many cerebral palsied individuals require institutional care throughout their lives. The range of adult functioning for this group is nearly unlimited. The adult accomplishments of children with learning disabilities is extremely diverse, although the adult goals for this population may be quite consistent. The goals for this group are identical to those for normal children, since the intelligence of children with learning disabilities is normal and no major motor or sensory impairments are present. Since the defect is a specific learning problem, it can often be overcome with intensive remediation and a child may mature to a normal or superior adult. However, since learning is the central activity of our schools, the failure to learn may be traumatic for children. It is significant that in a study of juvenile delinquents an alarming proportion were found to be children with learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia. 39 Apparently when a bright child finds success to be impossible in the classroom he will attempt to find it on the "street" and his attempts are usually ingenious and effective. However, given proper schooling, dyslexic children often achieve beyond what would be predicted on the basis of their intelligence or socioeconomic level. In one study, 54 boys who had attended a school for dyslexics were interviewed at the average age of 35. 33 Of this group, 14 had attained college degrees, 12 had attained doctoral degrees and all had attended at least 1 year of college. The occupations which these students attained included: physician, professor, personnel manager, lawyer, and city planner; two children became skilled laborers.

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Furthermore, there are innumerable individual cases of boys with dyslexia who conquered their disabilities, continued their education, and now enjoy normal adult life. 20

GENERAL LEARNING CHARACTERISTICS Characteristics of the child which bear on his school learning in addition to the specific strengths and weaknesses he possesses include intelligence, social and emotional traits, and neurological characteristics. The educational program which is planned for a child depends heavily upon the rate at which one might expect a child to learn various skills and abilities. The most accurate measure of learning rate is intelligence quotient. The most common of these are the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler scales. The.IQ score is computed by giving the child a variety of cognitive tasks and determining which of these he is capable of performing. The child's mental age is then established by referring to the norms which describe the age of children who are capable of performing tasks which this child performs during the test. The child's current chronological age is then divided into the mental age and multiplied by 100 in order to obtain the intelligence quotient. Thus if a child was able to perform the tasks of a nine year old, but his chronological age was 6, we would observe that his intelligence quotient would be 150. This means he learns 50 per cent faster than the average child of his chronological age. If the child performs tasks which a nine year old child is expected to perform, and his chronological age were 12, his IQ would be 75 and his rate of learning to this point in time would be 75 per cent of that of normal children. Since a child's past rate of learning is a good predictor of his future rate of learning, we might assume safely that the child whose intelligence quotient is 75 will learn in the future at a rate which is three fourths that of other children his age. Thus, we might expect a child of 16 years of age with an IQ of 75 to be working like a 12 year old child-that is, at approximately the sixth grade level. This is the basis for assuming that educable mentally retarded children may attain a functional level of literacy and communication skills. 16 This method of the assessment of cognitive skills is not completely accurate, as it would assume that an adult of 40 years of age would be able to perform the skills of an individual who was 30 years of age, if his IQ was 75. However, this is not the case. Most children with an IQ of 75 are not able to perform beyond approximately the sixth grade level, thus there is a ceiling beyond which the intellectual development is not likely to progress. Thus, there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference between the cognitive functioning of normal and retarded children. The qualitative differences between normal children and children with developmental disabilities has not been sufficiently emphasized in the development of educational programs and expectations for handicapped children. Several studies have found that educable retarded children are inferior to normal children of the same mental age in learning a paired associate list of pictures. 24 , 35 In these experiments, the children were given six pairs of pictures and the pairs were then disorganized by

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the experimenter. The child's task was to place the pictures into their original pairs. The child was given a number of trials and reinforcement for correct responses. This basic associative learning ability is apparently defective in retarded children. A more severe handicap is suffered by those children when the stimulus materials are abstract (pictures), than when the materials are concrete (objects).23 Finally, it has been illustrated that the complexity of oral language in retarded children is inferior to that of normal children of the same mental age. A child's educational experience will be dramatically affected by his social and personal characteristics. Acceptance by one's peers is extremely important to a developing child. It has been found by Dentler and Mackler that there is a low positive correlation (.25 to .50) between intelligence and peer acceptance in regular classes and special classes. IS Intelligence affects social acceptability, albeit in a weak fashion. More critical than intelligence is the child's personal demeanor and social grace. This factor becomes increasingly important as lower levels of mental age are considered. The trainable child succeeds or fails basically on the basis of his personal competence, rather than his cognitive competence, whereas the learning disabled child succeeds and fails on the basis of both. Schucman has reported that the teachers' judgment about the learning ability of trainable children was highly correlated (.72) with their social maturity.37 In this study, 114 children between the ages of 5 and 12 whose IQ's were below 50 were observed. The measures on the children included Stanford-Binet IQ, Vineland Social Maturity Scale, teacher ratings, and experimental tests. Two teachers evaluated each student in order to obtain the ratings and the interrater agreement exceeded .90. All of the tests which were administered were found to have reliabilities above .90. We may thus assume that the measuring instruments were sensitive. It was found that the Vineland Social Maturity Scores correlated higher with the teacher ratings than any other single test except a learning test which was specially devised by the experimenters. The Vineland Scale is based upon an interview between the experimenter and the parent or guardian of the child. The interview involves assessments on such issues as whether the child eats with a spoon, plays simple table games, participates in pre-adolescent play, does simple creative work, goes out unsupervised, and makes purchases for other people. Thus the social adjustment of trainable retarded children is particularly critical to their school progress. A trait which appears to have extreme importance for the functioning of retarded children in school is that of diligence and perseverance. One test which measures this ability is the Porteus Maze Test which requires a child to trace with a pencil through a complex maze accurately and quickly. It has been found by Cooper and his associates that this test assesses a child's activity in a classroom with a very high degree of accuracy.9 Children who scored low on this test were found to be unmanageable in the classroom situation and consequently difficult to teach. Children with high scores, on the other hand, have been found to be cooperative, motivated, and socially alert in classroom situations. It is also interesting that this test predicts adjustment in the community for

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low educable children more accurately than the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test. The Porteus Maze correlated with social adjustment at .77 whereas the Stanford-Binet correlated at .57 with adjustment.! Thus diligence, alertness, and motivation for careful work are critical to the adjustment of retarded children.

EDUCATIONAL STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES The cornerstone of the educational assessment is the test or group of tests which describe the current educational abilities and disabilities of the child. The intelligence and social characteristics of the child will suggest general responsiveness of the child to educational efforts. The critical information, however, for a teacher or therapist who is working with the child is his current level of functioning in areas such as language, reading, arithmetic, writing, and social skills. Measurement of a child's current functioning level is a delicate process which requires reliance on the basic principles of measurement which have been developed by psychologists. 11 The three vital characteristics of an effective measuring instrument are its (1) validity, (2) reliability, and (3) usability. Although these principles are discussed at appropriate length in several textbooks of measurement, they will be briefly outlined here. The validity of a test refers to the extent to which the test fulfills its basic purpose in measuring what it purports to measure. There are two types of validity which may be outlined. Content validity, also known as "face validity," refers to whether the test contains content and material which are of interest to the examiner. For example, if the examiner wished to know about the child's ability to perform simple arithmetic computations, he would examine the items on the test to identify whether those items were contained in the testing instrument. A test would possess content validity for handwriting if the child's performance was judged on the basis of writing and not on the basis of other associated skills such as reading or drawing. The most critical form of validity is predictive validity. Predictive validity refers to the extent to which the test predicts the child's performance on other more comprehensive measures of his ability in the area which has been tested. All tests are a sample of the child's behavior or ability. In a given test, all of the possible questions could never be asked. Thus it is important to know whether the particular sample used is representative of the child's behavior and ability. If the sample is representative, the test will have high predictive validity; and if the sample is not representative, the test will have low predictive validity. The predictive validity is measured by correlating performance on this test with the performance on a longer, more comprehensive test which may be given at the same time or in the future. Only tests which have well established content validity or well documented predictive validity deserve a place in an educational assessment. The reliability of a test is the consistency with which the test measures whatever it may measure. A test may be reliable, i.e., consistent, without being valid, i.e., without fulfilling its basic purpose. A test of

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finger tapping may be reliable without indicating anything else about the individual's intelligence or academic ability. There are two forms of reliability. Internal consistency is a form of reliability that refers to whether or not performance on a test is similar at different points in the test. If a single test contains many different types of items, such as reading long words, copying geometric forms, and constructing block designs, and the performance on all of these items is added into one score, the test will not have internal consistency. The child may do very well on one part of the test and very poorly on another part, and receive a moderate score which is not a true reflection of his abilities in these different areas. The second form of reliability is the test-retest reliability which refers to whether or not a child gets similar scores at two different points in time. If the test does not have high test-retest reliability, it is subject to temporary vacillation depending on how the child feels and whether the examiner provides clear instructions. Both forms of reliability should exceed .85 and preferably be in the .90 range in order to be satisfactory. The validity of a test on the other hand should usually exceed .65, with the more satisfactory levels being in the range of .75 to .85. The usability of the test refers to whether or not it may be easily administered, whether it takes excessive amounts of time, and most of all whether it has norms from which accurate descriptions of the child's level of functioning may be inferred. The norms of a test are provided in a technical manual which accompanies every test and should be examined by individuals who are constructing an educational battery which will be used for large numbers of children. Rigid standards for the norming of tests are available in a manual which is provided by the American Psychological Association; these standards must be met, if the test is to receive the confidence of professional users. A pitfall for educational evaluators is that many tests have adequate content validity and acceptable reliability, but the norms are either absent or extremely limited and unsatisfactory. Thus, conclusive statements about the level of functioning of the child on the basis of these measures are impossible. If the child is to be compared to others as a result of the testing, these measures should be avoided. A group of educational tests which meet the criteria of validity, reliability and usability are listed in Table 1. These tests may be described as formal tests since they have a standard format and the child's performance on the test is judged objectively rather than being subject to the interpretation of the examiner. Formal tests may be either normreferenced or criterion-referenced. Norm-referenced tests provide information about the child's standing relative to other children. Accurate norms on the tests are the basis for judging the child's functioning. On norm-referenced tests, one might describe a child as having reading skills which are like those of a second grader, arithmetic skills which are like those of a third grader, and social skills which are like those of a 5 year old child. Criterion reference tests, on the other hand, describe a child's performance relative to an absolute standard. For example, a child may be described as reading second grade material with 90 per cent accuracy at the rate of 15 words per minute; or he may be described as being

Table 1. Educational Assessment Tests NAME

Survey Tests The Metropolitan Achievement Test Iowa Test Of Basic Skills Stanford Achievement Test California Achievement Test Wide Range Achievement Test

Learning Aptitude Tests Detroit Test Of Learning Aptitude Illinois Test Of Psycholinguistic Abilities

Slingerland Screening Test For Identifying Children With Specific Language Disability Learning Methods Test

Reading Tests Gates-McKillop Reading Diagnostic Test Spache Diagnostic Reading Scale Bond-Balow-Hoyt Reading Diagnostic Test Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test Durrel-Analysis of Reading Difficulty Botel Reading Inventory Gray Oral Reading Test

SUBTEST

SUBTEST RELIABILITIES

M t::l C

Word Knowledge, Word Discrimination, Reading, Arthmetic, Language Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension, Language, Arithmetic, Work Study Skills Word Reading, Paragraph Meaning, Vocabulary, Spelling, Word Study Skills, Arithmetic, Language Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension, Language, Spelling, Arithmetic Spelling, Word Pronunciation, Arithmetic

.79-.96 .70-.93 .66-.96 .86-.96 .88-.95

(")

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> t"'

>

'"'" '"'"~ t'j

t'j

Z

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Pictorial-Verbal Absurdities, Verbal-Pictorial Opposites, Motor Speed Precision, Auditory-Attention Span, Visual Attention Span Auditory Decoding, Visual Decoding, Auditory Vocal Association, Visual-Motor Association, Vocal Encoding, Motor Encoding, Auditory-Vocal Automatic, Auditory-Vocal Sequencing, VisualMotor Sequencing Visual Copying, Visual Memory, Visual Discrimination, Auditory Perception, Echolalia Test Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Tactile, Combination Method Paragraph, Phrase, Word Reading, Letter Sounds, Auditory Bending, Syllabication, Auditory Discrimination, Spelling Word Recognition, Word Analysis, Reading Passage Comprehension Words In Isolation, Words In Context, Visual-Structural Analysis, Syllabication, Word Synthesis, Vowel-Consonant Sounds Vocabulary, Comprehension Oral Reading, Silent Reading, Listening, Comprehension, WordLetter Recognition Phonics Mastery, Word Recognition, Word Opposites Reading Passages Orally

No Data Reported .50-.95

No Data Reported

.91-.97

No Data Available On Reliability No Data Available .80-.97 .89-.94 No Data Available On Reliability No Data Availabl~' On Reliability Reliability Given In Terms of Standard Error of Measurement: 1.98-4.59

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able to count from 1 to 15 and not being able to perform single digit additions in arithmetic. The tests described in Table 1 are useful primarily as normreferenced tests. They are also useful as criterion-referenced tests to the extent that the examiner is able to describe the child's test performance. The scores obtainable on these tests come in three forms: grade level, age level, and percentile for his age level. If a child was observed to have a 4.5 score in spelling, it could be assumed that this meant the child was performing at the middle of fourth grade in this area of academic work. It should be emphasized that the educational remediation of children depends on the criterion-referenced characteristics of the test. That is, the teacher who will ultimately work with the child must know specifically what the child was capable of doing at the point when he was tested. The description of the results of tests usually includes the areas which were tested and the grade levels of the children who were examined. Accuracy in describing the areas which were tested is important. It is seldom useful to say the child is reading at the fourth grade level. Different reading tests measure different abilities and these distinctions must be outlined. For example, the Wide Range Achievement Test In Reading and The Gray Oral Reading Test both measure the child's ability to read words aloud and these tests are correlated at a high level of .94. 29 However, the Wide Range Achievement Test in Reading and the Metropolitan Achievement Test correlate below. 70. 19 ,35 This is due to the fact that the Metropolitan Achievement Test measures silent reading comprehension whereas the WRAT measures oral reading of single words. The relationship between oral reading and silent comprehension is not as strong as that between two different measures of oral reading. In diagnostic testing for learning disabilities, it is particularly important to describe the test in detail. For example, it is not safe to say that a child has poor visual memory. It has been found that visual memory for lower case letters is not highly correlated with visual memory for objects, and visual memory for geometric forms is not highly correlated with either of the first two memory tests.19 Thus, there is a multitude of visual memory abilities and the specific ability being tested must be differentiated from other possible abilities. This is also true of social and self-help skills which are important for educable and trainable retarded children. Interpersonal skills such as working together and simple conversation are not highly correlated with other social skills such as assuming responsibility for independent work. These different measures must be each described if a child's personal profile is to be clearly outlined. An educational program for pupils with a developmental disability usually relies heavily on language abilities of the children. However, the specific testing for these abilities is usually not emphasized in the educational evaluation. The receptive language of children is well measured with the intelligence tests such as the Stanford-Binet Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. In these tests the examiner is transmitting complex messages orally and asking complicated questions, and the child is required to respond in a variety of modalities, including verbal and manual. It is significant that the WISC verbal test correlates .63 with overall high school grades.s This illustrates the verbal nature of

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both intelligence and school activity. Functional intelligence is essentially a language capability and if the intelligence of a child is accurately measured, then accurate statements about his language functioning can usually be made. Expressive language is not measured by intelligence tests and often is ignored in interdisciplinary evaluations. Myklebust has found that expressive language increases with chronological age in a remarkably consistent manner.31 He asked a group of 750 normal children, aged 7 to 17, to write a story of whatever length they wished. He reported that the words per sentence contained in the story, which is a measure of the complexity of expressive language, increased linearly from age 7 to 17. The performances of normal children at ages 7,9,11,13,15 and 17 in words per sentence were as follows: 6.5,9.5,11.5,14,15, and 16 respectively. In contrast, the performances of educable mentally retarded children at ages 9,11, 13, and 15, in terms of words per sentence, were 7, 7, 8, and 8 respectively. Although there is a slight increase in expressive language for educable mentally retarded children, they are inferior to normals in both level and rate of language acquisition. Children with learning disabilities were found to perform very erratically and similar to normals in terms of absolute level of functioning. The language performance of children is measured exhaustively in the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITP A). On this measure, it has been found that educable mentally retarded children perform uniformly lower than normal in a manner parallel to normals on all nine subtests of this battery. 4 With this test it has been reported that children with cerebral palsy are more clearly distinguished from each other in terms of their abilities to produce complex forms of language in an accurate and automatic manner rather than in their abilities to respond accurately to smaller units of language such as single sounds and visual representations of actions. 2H This test is not useful for the analysis of learning disabilities, since these disabilities are extremely specific and the measures in this test are globaP6 The social adjustment of children with developmental disabilities in school is of paramount importance. In one interesting study the attitudes of 214 normal fourth and fifth graders toward educable children in a special class were examined. 7Although the educable children were given global ratings of favorable, their behavior was rated as unfavorable by these normal children. Furthermore, the normal children oriented to the social and athletic characteristics of the retarded children rather than the intellectual and academic abilities. In addition, trainable children who are rated as successful in their school programs by teachers have been found to be higher on social behaviors as assessed by the Cain-Levine Social Competency Scale than trainable children who are lower on this scale. 30 The most widely used measure of social ability is the Vineland Social Maturity Scale. In an investigation of 114 trainable children in public school classes, this test was found to correlate at a high level of 0.72 with the teacher's rating of the educability of these children. 37 This test has several subscales which include: (1) self-help general, (2) self-help eating, (3) self-help dressing, (4) self-help direction, (5) occupation, (6) com-

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munication, (7) locomotion, and (8) socialization. Specific questions such as whether the child washes his face unassisted, whether he uses a pencil for writing, and whether he buys his own clothing and controls his own major financial expenditures are asked and tabulated in this questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of an interview between the examiner and the parents or custodian of the child. The reliability of the subscales of this test is above 0.70, which is adequate, although not as high as might be desirable. Another measure which has been widely used is the California Test of Personality. This has been found to be a sensitive instrument for assessing the social acceptability of children in special classes, regular classes, and institutions. 27 Informal testing is an approach which has some support among special educators and is common in many clinics which are involved with educational assessment. Adv~cates of this approach argue that a child is unique and that tests should be tailored to the child's needs and abilities. They further contend that evaluation should occur in the context of teaching rather than in a remote location. The belief is that the teacher or therapist should be the person who conducts the evaluation rather than the specialists who are not involved with the process of training and instruction. 3R The strength of this approach is that the testing will usually have a high degree of content validity and will provide a basis for instruction in some cases. The weakness of the approach is that the tests will have a low degree of predictive validity and a low level of reliability. The reason that predictive validity and reliability are inadequate is that the teacher usually takes an extremely limited sample of behavior under these circumstances. She may ask the child to read a small list of 3 or 4 words, perform 2 or 3 arithmetic operations, and so forth. The child may or may not have learned each of these particular operations. In either case, the estimate of the child's ability based on this limited sample will be inaccurate. Informal measures usually do not meet many of the cardinal principles of measurement which have been outlined previously. Despite the shortcomings of informal tests, there are some circumstances in which informal measurement is indispensable. Often the behavior of trainable children ina testing situation is not such that the child can be made to perform standardized tasks. The teacher must work with the child in whatever way she is able, in order to estimate his abilities. Also there are occasions when the evaluator may attempt to teach the child a skill and observe his reaction to the teaching situation. An illustration of this is a study by Schucman in which five tasks were developed for trainable children and taught over a limited period of time. 37 It was found that the performance of the children on the tasks after training was a more accurate predictor of the child's learning in a future school situation than the child's performance on either the Stanford-Binet Test or the Vineland Social Maturity Scales. The child's learning in a teaching situation may sometimes be the best single predictor of his learning in a larger school setting. However, the design and administration of learning tasks for this purpose is time consuming and prohibitive. Tests which measure the child's current level of functioning, rather than his learning over a period of time, will remain the foundation of educational assessment.

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CONDITIONS FOR LEARNING An educational evaluator is obliged to make an estimation of the conditions under which he thinks the child may progress educationally. This often involves the decision as to whether special class placement, institutional placement, home instruction, or regular class participation is most desirable. Although an exhaustive review of the effectiveness of different special education intervention cannot be provided here, an outline of the most salient findings of recent work will be sketched. Cain and Levine have made a monumental evaluation of different placements for trainable children. 5 They had four groups of children including school and nonschool children living at home, and school and nonschool children living in an institution. All of these groups were equated with control groups on chronological age, mental age, intelligence, and social competency. These groups were observed over a 2 year period and the following conclusions were drawn: (1) The school and non school groups living at home made significant gains in social competency. These groups did not differ from each other. (2) The school and nonschool institutionalized children substantially decreased in social competency relative to a control group and there were no differences between these two experimental groups. (3) The school and nonschool groups living at home did not differ in their social competency gains. Living in the community increases social skills whereas living in an institution impairs the development of these abilities; and special class attendance does not significantly affect this area of functioning. Cain and Levine observed that a small fraction of the time spent by the children in the special classes was devoted to social competency development. Thus the classes may well have had inadequate curricula which could be improved in future programs. Injudging whether or not a child should be enrolled in a special class, the curriculum of the class and the teacher's goals should be evaluated and recorded. The optimum conditions of learning for educable children are not clear. A multitude of studies have compared the effects of regular class and special class placement for these children with the result that few differences are observed. When differences are present the regular class placement has been superior to special class placementY However, although the academic performance of educable children is slightly superior in the regular class, the social acceptance of educable children in these classes is extremely low. 40 Wrights tone and his associates evaluated 147 classes in New York City with respect to the academic and social achievement of educable children and drew the conclusion that the cost of the classes in terms of professional effort and time is not justifiable. However, it has also been demonstrated that educable children can make remarkable progress in academic areas. 21 In a comparison of 14 educable children matched on chronological age and IQ, it was found that remedial reading instruction, which consisted of only 30 minutes per day, was able to improve reading ability 21/2 years in a 2 year period. The control group achieved a gain of half a year in this 2 year period which is normal for children of this age and IQ. Thus, systematic academic intervention

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clearly has salutary effects and the failure of special classrooms is probably due to the lack of appropriate curricula. Children with learning disabilities are known to make dramatic achievements in areas such as reading, spelling, language, and arithmetic, provided that instruction is directed to their area of difficulty.3 Furthermore, these gains may be maintained with a minimal amount of follow-up remediation, although the gains will be dissolved if no followup is provided. In most remedial programs, the rate of gain during the program is four to six times the gain of the children prior to the entrance into the program and the rate of gain following the program is dependent upon the amount of post-remedial assistance. A host of curricular innovations are now being observed in the educational arena. These innovations include programmed instruction, behavior modification, peer tutoring, and new curricular materials. Although these programs have often been claimed to be effective, the examination of these innovations will not be attempted in this paper. 22 Suffice it to say that the educational evaluator must survey the local programs and compare their characteristics with the characteristics of the child which have been obtained in the manner described previously in this discussion. The level of cognitive skill, the rate of learning, and the social and personal abilities which are demanded in the educational setting must be matched to those of the child, if an educational program and placement are to enhance the growth of the child.

REFERENCES 1. Appel, M. J., Williams, C. N., and Fishel, K. N.: Significant factors in placing mentalretar-

dates from a workshop situation. Personnel and Guidance J., 41 :260, 1962. 2. Baller, W. R., Charles O. C., and Miller, E. L.: Mid-life attainment of the mentally retarded: A longitudinal study. University of Nebraska, 1966. 3. Balow, B.: The long term effect of remedial reading instruction. The Reading Teacher, 18:581, 1965. 4. Bateman, B. D., and Wetherell, J.: Psycholinguistic aspects of mental retardation. Ment. Retar., 3:8, 1965. 5. Cain, L. F., and Levine, S.: Effect of community and institutional school programs on trainable mentally retarded children. Council for Exceptional Children, Research Monograph B-1, 1963. 6. Cartwright, G. P.: Written language abilities of educable mentally retarded and normal children. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 72:499, 1967-68. 7. Clark, E. T.: Children's perception of educable mentally retarded children. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 68:602, 1963-64. 8. Conry, R., and Plant, W. T.: WAIS and group predictions of an a:cademic success criterion: high schools and college. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 25:493, 1965. 9. Cooper, G. D., York, M. W., and Adams, II. B.: The Porteus test and various measures of intelligence with southern negro adolescents. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 71 :787, 1966-67. 10. Critchley, M.: The Dyslexic Child. Springfield, Illinois, Charles C Thomas, 2nd ed. 1970. 11. Cronbach, L. J.: Essentials of Psychological Testing. New York, Harper and Row, 3rd ed., 1970. 12. Cruickshank, W. M.: The Brain-Injured Child In Home, School, and Community. Syracuse, New York, Syracuse University Press, 1967. 13. Delp, H. A., and Lorenz, M.: Follow-Up of 84 public school special class pupils with IQs below 50. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 58:175,1953. 14. Denhoff, E., Robinault, 1. P.: Cerebral Palsy and Related Disorders. A Developmental Approach to Dysfunction. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1960. 15. Dentler, R. A., and Mackler, B.: Ability and sociometric status among normal and retarded children: A review of the literature. Psychol. Bull., 59:273, 1962. 16. Dunn, L. M.: (ed.) Exceptional Children in the Schools. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.

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17. Goldstein, H., Moss, J. W., and Jordan, L.: The Efficacy of Special Class Training on the Development of Mentally Retarded Children. Cooperative Research Project No. 619 U.S. Office of Education, 1965. 18. Guthrie, J. T., and Goldberg, H. K.: Visual sequential memory in reading disability. J. Learning Disabilities, 5 :41, 1972. 19. Guthrie, J. T., Goldberg, H. K., and Finucci, J.: Independence of abilities in disabled readers. J. Reading Behavior (in press, 1972). 20. Harris, A. J.: Casebook on Reading Disability. New York, David McKay, 1970. 21. Hegge, T. G.: Special reading disability with particular reference to the mentally deficient. Proceedings of the American Association of Mental Deficiency. 39:297, 1934. 22. Hewett, F. M., Mayhew, D., and Rabb, E.: An experimental reading program for neurologically impaired, mentally retarded, and severely emotionally disturbed children. Amer. J. Orthopsychiatry, 37:35, 1967. 23: Iscoe, E., and Semler,!. J.: Paired associate learning in normal and mentally retarded children as a function of four experimental conditions. J. Compo Physio!. Psycho!., 57:387, 1964. 24. Jensen, A. R.: Rote learning in retarded adults and normal children. Amer J. Ment. Defic., 69:828, 1964. 25. Johnson, G. 0.: A Comparative Study of the Personal and Social Adjustment of Mentally Handicapped Children Placed in Special Classes with Mentally Handicapped Children Who Remain in Regular Classes. Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, 1961. 26. Kass, C. E.: Psycholinguistic disabilities of children with reading problems. Except. Child., 32:533, 1965. 27. Kern, W. H., and Pfaeffie, H.: A comparison of social adjustment of mentally retarded children in various educational settings. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 67:407, 1962. 28. Lamb, S. H.: The Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities: Implications for diagnosis and remediation. In Tarnopol, L., ed.: Learning Disabilities. Springfield, Illinois, Charles C. Thomas, 1969. 29. Lawson, J. R, and Avila, D.: Comparison of Wide Range Achievement Tests and Gray Oral Reading paragraph of mentally retarded adults. Percept. Motor Skills, 14:474, 1962. 30. Levine, S., Elzey, F. F., and Paulson, F. L.: Social competence of school and non-school trainable mentally retarded. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 71 :112, 1966-67. 31. Myklebust, H. R: Development and Disorders Of Written Language. New York, Grune & Stratton, 1965. 32. Peckham, R A.: Problems in job adjustment of the mentally retarded. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 56: 448, 1951-52. 33. Rawson, M. B.: Developmental Language Disability: Adult Accomplishments of Dyslexic Boys. Baltimore, Maryland, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968. 34. Rieber, M.: Verbal mediation in normal and retarded children. Amer. J. Ment. Defic., 68:634, 1963-64. 35. Reger, R: Brief tests of intelligence and academic achievements. Psycho!. Rep., 11 :82, 1962. 36. Saenger, G.: The Adjustment of Severely Retarded Adults In The Community. New York State Inter-departmental Health Resources Board, Albany, New York, 1957. 37. Schucman, H.: Evaluating the educability of the severely mentally retarded child. Psycho!. Mono., 74:14, 1960. 38. Smith, R. M., ed.: Teacher Diagnosis of Educational Difficulties. Columbus, Ohio, Charles E. Merrill Co., 1969. 39. Tarnopol, L.: Delinquency and learning disabilities. In Tarnopol, L., ed.: Learning Disabilities. Springfield, Illinois, Charles C Thomas, 1969. 40. Wrightstone, J. W., Forlano, G., Lapkowski, J. R., et a!.: A Comparison of Educational Outcomes Under Single Track and Two Track Plans For Educable Mentally Retarded Children. Board of Education, Brooklyn, New York, 1959. The John F. Kennedy Institute 707 North Broadway Baltimore, Maryland 21205