Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners [1st ed.] 9783030565954, 9783030565961

Citation preview

Patrick Griffin Kerry Woods  Editors

Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners

Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners

Patrick Griffin • Kerry Woods Editors

Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners

Editors Patrick Griffin Melbourne Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

Kerry Woods Assessment Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-56595-4    ISBN 978-3-030-56596-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56596-1 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book celebrates the results of a project that began in 2004 because a Down syndrome student was excluded from a class during an assessment practical teaching exercise of a student teacher. It ended with seven doctoral studies over a 10-year period describing a curriculum for students with disabilities, or as we prefer to call them – students with additional needs – SWANs. Along the journey, hundreds of teachers, thousands of students and numerous administrators have become absorbed in the ideas behind the project. One state government adopted the project through Karen Underwood as a co-investigator and absorbed the assessment work of the SWANs into a package called ABLES. This helped to disseminate the work of the project into government and independent schools nationally. The volume presents the narrative of the origins of the Students with Additional Needs (SWANs) research project that was conducted over more than 10 years. It discusses the context in which the idea for the SWANs study emerged and the importance of critical incidents in stimulating research and development. It illustrates the events in a school classroom in 2004 involving a student teacher evaluation class, a supervising teacher who did not know how to include a student with additional needs in classroom activities, and the inadequacy of materials available for mainstream teachers who had students with additional needs in the classroom.

Back Story This research program had an interesting beginning. I was at a school evaluating a student teacher (or teacher candidate as they are now known and we will use the terms teacher, teacher candidate and student to avoid confusion) deliver a lesson on fractions in her final teaching round. The lesson started out well. The teacher candidate had the students’ attention and they were engaged in the class activities to do with fractions and decimals in year six. About halfway through the lesson the students began to agitate, wave and shout a student’s name. They were obviously v

vi

Preface

distracted by activities outside. Through the window I could see a student and an adult. The student was playing on the playground equipment, and having a great time gesturing and calling out the names of the students in the class. The other students told me he was out in ‘free time’ because he could not ‘do fractions’. I asked the teacher why he was excluded. She explained that the adult was a teacher aide employed to look after the student who had Down syndrome and to help him with his learning. I asked why he was not in the class along with the teacher aide, following what was happening with the rest of the class. I was shocked at the answer. The teacher explained that if the student was inside the class, he would be disruptive and it was not fair to the teacher candidate to have such a student in the class while she was being evaluated. I asked how the teacher candidate would get experience with students with disabilities if they were excluded during evaluation lessons. She had no answer except to say again that it was unfair to the teacher candidate to have to cope with this student during an evaluation lesson. It was ironic that the student was already being disruptive and this teacher candidate had already lost control of the class. So the net effect for the teacher candidate of removing the student with Down syndrome was zero. After the lesson I met with the teacher candidate to discuss my evaluation report. We discussed different strategies for dealing with disruptive students regardless of disability. The candidate told me that she had never had any training or any assistance in teaching students with special needs. As it turned out, neither had the teacher who was expected to coach and to develop this teacher candidate. We all agreed that this was not a satisfactory situation. I left and drove to the Victorian Department of Education and Training headquarters to meet with a former Master’s degree student, Karen Underwood, who was working in the Student Wellbeing Division. I knew that Karen had a daughter experiencing learning difficulties. Karen explained that most mainstream teachers have almost no skill, no training, no resources, and no encouragement to work effectively with students with additional needs. We decided that we would try to develop something to support teachers of students with additional needs (SWANs). It took several weeks to prepare a proposal for partnership funding from the Australia Research Council (ARC). The proposal centred on every student having a right to appropriate intervention. Essentially, we proposed a partnership between the University of Melbourne and the Department of Education and Training (the Department). An ARC Linkage project required the industry partner to make both a cash and in-kind contribution to the project. The initial aim was to help mainstream teachers work effectively with students with additional needs in the classroom. We submitted our proposal and budget to the Australian Research Council, but the application was unsuccessful. So Karen negotiated with her supervisors inside the Department to use the initial cash commitment to begin a project independent of the ARC to develop curriculum support materials. The leaders of the Student Wellbeing Division at the Department gave their support to her work and ours. In the meantime, we continued to redevelop the research proposal. The first application was submitted in 2003. The second application was submitted one year later and was successful. The aim of that project was to build

Preface

vii

learning progressions and to assist teachers to place every student on a learning trajectory so that instructional intervention strategies could be developed to enable students to make progress. As can be seen in the articles in this volume, at the outset of this work it was understood that many students do not make positive progress at all and were not expected to learn the same curriculum as students without additional needs. Teaching students with severe intellectual disability and multiple co-­ occurring disabilities was a particular challenge for mainstream teachers and even for special education schools and their staff. A steering committee was formed with members of the Department, members of the Principals Association for Specialist Schools (PASS), and other school principals, academics, assessment specialists, special education teachers, and members of the research team. The initial research team included myself, Karen Underwood, Kerry Woods, Bernadette Coles-Janess, and Eileen Roberts. Kerry, Bernadette and Eileen began their doctoral studies, which are reported in this volume, and the project was the harbinger of a change in education for students with special needs and a project that lasted more than 10 years. The project focused on three broad areas of learning: Kerry’s doctorate led the research into communication, language, and literacy, Bernadette examined interpersonal skills, and Eileen examined personal learning skills. After 3 years we decided to resubmit to the ARC for a further round of studies as part of a second Linkage project. By this time Kerry had become eligible to be research supervisor, and she then supervised the doctoral studies of Lindsey Gale, Toshiko Kamei, Jane Strickland, and Emily White who worked on learning areas related to movement, thinking and problem-solving, numeracy, and digital literacy, respectively. The chapters in this volume outline each of their contributions to the overall definition of SWANs learning progressions, and the contribution Karen Underwood made to extending the Victorian school curriculum to ensure the learning of all students was acknowledged. One doctoral student had a unique experience. Eileen Roberts took time out from her doctoral studies to have children and returned after several years to complete a doctoral dissertation. During the interval her work had become adopted by government policy so she had to rewrite her conclusion to reflect changes that the project had made in the intervening period. The project covered two waves of research, each funded by the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Education Department. A doctoral candidate in the first group, Kerry Woods, became accredited to supervise other doctoral students within 2 years of completing her own study. Her capacity to complete this task was aided by the way in which the study pioneered a different approach to supervision of higher degree research candidates. People expressing a desire to complete their doctorate in this area were given an opportunity to study a particular aspect of the SWANs project. They were each required to complete their study using the same or very similar methods addressing very different aspects of the education of SWANs. The different chapters in this book illustrate how this work was distributed across the doctoral candidates who learned to work as a team in solving problems of assessment, teaching, and

viii

Preface

reporting on cognitive progress of the SWANs. The typical isolation of doctoral candidates all studying their own topic had no role in this project. This was a collaborative team approach involving supervision by Kerry Woods and myself to the completion of doctoral dissertations by each of the leading authors of the chapters in the book. If it were not for one particular teacher candidate encountering a student with Down syndrome and a classroom teacher who had no ability to help or to intervene appropriately with the teacher candidate or the student, this project might not exist. If it were not for the willingness of the Victorian Department of Education and Training to become involved and to contribute to the project, largely through Karen Underwood’s leadership, this project would not exist. The identity of the student with Down syndrome, the training of the teacher candidate, and the incapacity of the classroom teacher to meet the needs of either the candidate or the student have been forgotten as they were representative of the situation in teaching, assessment, and learning for many students with additional needs. A number of happy coincidences thus led to the collaboration of the Department of Education with the University of Melbourne on the SWANs project. Karen Underwood’s undergraduate and postgraduate studies, teaching, consultancy, and Department of Education and Training roles all contributed to the development of a foundation for blending teaching and research. The impact of a single critical incident sparked a collaboration that stretched for more than 10 years and produced the assessments, learning progressions, and support materials for students with additional needs described in the chapters of this book. The path that led to the work on the design of curriculum support resources for students with additional needs stretched out over even more than the 10 years of the SWANs project. Karen’s work as a teacher of students with additional needs largely influenced the applied nature of the research. As a newly minted English teacher (in the late 1970s), keen to succeed in a secondary school with a high number of students with learning difficulties, she drew on her studies of linguistics to ensure lessons met the diverse learning needs of the students. She taught what she thought the students were ready to learn. This was a deliberate behaviour management strategy at the time, but, as teachers know, teaching students skills and knowledge they are ready to learn makes them more likely to participate in classroom activities. Being ‘good’ with ‘difficult’ students was what teaching meant to her and resulted in the establishment of a learning centre of around a hundred students in a mainstream secondary school in the early to mid-1990s. The learning centre was staffed by teacher aides skilled in working with students with disability, two primary school teachers, and herself. Their vision was to ensure all students stayed in school, and to support that goal they wrote and resourced hundreds of individual learning plans. They adapted curriculum for every learning area from Year 7 to Victorian Certificate of Education (Years 11 and 12) level for students with cognitive, developmental, motor, sensory, and severe behavioural disabilities. Not all of their work would be judged as successful by today’s standards, but all their students had a tailored learning experience in all of their learning areas.

Preface

ix

At that time, there was no process to guide adaptation of curriculum other than to attempt to meet individual student needs based on the student’s classroom teachers’ requests for assistance, but the programs were thoughtful and personalised and consequently reduced the number of outbursts and disruptive behaviours among students. Over successive years the school gained a reputation for doing well with students with learning difficulties. It seemed clear to them that much of the source of ‘difficulty’ was in the rigidity of the curriculum and classroom programs and their failure to meet students’ needs as learners. An unanticipated outcome of the work was the number of families and students that sought access to the school in the hope of being included in the learning centre program. The principal often voiced his concern that they would build a reputation for the school that might not be sustainable over time. Karen’s self-described naïveté in believing that others merely needed to carry on the work without any mentoring and coaching or, more importantly, documenting processes and protocols impacted the program’s continuation at the school and taught her lessons that guided the consequent development of the Towards Foundation Victorian Curriculum work supported by the Department of Education and Training from 2003. As a result of the classroom incident with the Down syndrome student, I visited Karen at the Department of Education and Training offices in 2003 to talk about ways to support teachers of students with additional needs. The Student Wellbeing Division gave its support to participation in the Australian Research Council Linkage proposal to build new, criterion-referenced frameworks to identify the abilities, rather than disabilities, of students with learning difficulties. It was agreed that she would take the role of partner investigator and that we would develop assessment, reporting, and curriculum support materials that were closely integrated and placed strong emphasis on ease of use by teachers. This volume brings together the insights of a teacher experienced in special needs, a research agenda, and the catalytic impact of a critical incident in a classroom. The nature of the study has its methodological origins in the work of the Education Department of Victoria in the development of literacy and numeracy profiles in both first and second English language for students and adults. Each of these projects was marked by at least one developmental progression, empirically developed and trialled with adults and children where relevant. It was the development of these progressions as a manifestation of underlying latent constructs that each of the doctoral candidates was required to follow. In 1987 Glaser’s definition of criterion-­referenced assessment had few examples of ‘stages of increasing competence’. The work of Sir Paul Black in 1987, in developing the UK Task Group of Assessment and Teaching (TGAT), took a similar approach to developmental progressions, but in the UK, these were tied to be year and age levels. At the University of Indiana, Jerry Harsty was experimenting rubric-like descriptions of increasing reading competence. Meetings between Sir Paul Black and myself and between Jerry Harsty and another doctoral student, Patricia Smith, in 1987 led to a consolidated approach to the methodology of developing progressions. So this project has international origins in methodology and the work of these progenitors helped to shape this project.

x

Preface

Comments by readers of the various papers have indicated that the project needed two things: a consolidated collection of the research and an international perspective in order to obtain the global impact that the candidates’ doctoral studies deserve. That’s the purpose of this book. With exposure to educators at university and schools, SWANs all round the world can benefit from the work. A detailed analysis of the project follows in the subsequent 14 chapters. Parkville, VIC, Australia

Patrick Griffin

Contents

1 Profiling Developmental Learning for Students with Additional Needs (SWANs)����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Patrick Griffin 2 Competence Assessment��������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 Patrick Griffin 3 Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 Kerry Woods and Patrick Griffin 4 Using Symbols to Make Meaning: Functional Literacy for Students with Additional Needs��������������������������������������������������������   43 Kerry Woods and Patrick Griffin 5 Interpersonal Competence for Students with Additional Needs ��������   59 Bernadette Coles-Janess and Patrick Griffin 6 Cognitive Skills – Students with Additional Learning Needs and Autism Spectrum Disorder��������������������������������������������������������������   71 Eileen Roberts and Patrick Griffin 7 Profiling Transitions in Emotional Development for Students with Additional Learning Needs ������������������������������������������������������������   89 Eileen Roberts and Patrick Griffin 8 The Development of Problem-Solving Rubrics to Define Learning Progressions for Students with Additional Needs����������������  101 Toshiko Kamei and Kerry Woods 9 Assessing and Understanding Early Numeracy for Students with Additional Learning Needs ������������������������������������������������������������  115 Jane Strickland, Kerry Woods, and Masa Pavlovic

xi

xii

Contents

10 Understanding and Mapping Digital Literacy for Students with Disability������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 Emily H. White, Masa Pavlovic, and Shiralee Poed 11 Supporting Motor Learning in the Classroom for Students with Motor Performance Needs��������������������������������������������������������������  157 Lindsey Gale 12 Thinking Skills Instructional Strategies: Teaching Students with Additional Needs to be Better Thinkers����������������������������������������  185 Toshiko Kamei 13 Using Differential Item Functioning to Validate a Judgement-Based Assessment of Emergent Literacy for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder ��������������������������������������  197 Kerry Woods and Masa Pavlovic 14 A Curriculum for Students with Additional Needs������������������������������  209 Karen Underwood Appendix: Learning Progressions for Students with Additional Needs������  217

About the Editors

Patrick Griffin  held the Chair of Education (Assessment) at the University of Melbourne and was the Founding Director of the Assessment Research Centre. His work includes more than 40 years in teaching and research in education measurement. He focuses on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for performance assessment, problem solving and higher order competency assessment and performance reporting. He was the measurement team leader for UNESCO in the SACMEQ project and a World Bank consultant in Vietnam, Philippines and China. He retired from university of Melbourne in 2015. He still leads several national and international studies of problem solving, literacy and numeracy and was the Executive Director of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project in which he pioneered the assessment of collaborative problem solving. His research into reliable rubrics is on display through the doctoral students’ work in this volume on the work with special needs students.

xiii

xiv

About the Editors

Kerry Woods  devoted 16 years to understanding how teachers observe their students and use formal and informal sources of assessment data to guide their classroom planning and teaching. Her doctoral research investigated the design and validation of criterion-referenced assessments of communication and literacy to support personalised learning for students with diverse additional needs. In collaboration with fellow academics and school and policy leaders, her research led to the development of an integrated program of advice and support for teachers of students with disability. She is currently an honorary Senior Fellow of the Assessment Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.

Contributors

Bernadette Coles-Janess  University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Lindsey  Gale  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Nossal Institute for Global Health, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, Melbourne, Australia Patrick  Griffin  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Toshiko Kamei  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Melbourne, Australia Masa Pavlovic  Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, East Melbourne, Australia Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority/Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Melbourne, Australia Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Parkville, VIC, Australia Shiralee Poed  Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Eileen  Roberts  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Jane  Strickland  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Parkville, VIC, Australia Karen Underwood  Victorian Department of Education and Training, Melbourne, Australia Emily H. White  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Melbourne, Australia Kerry Woods  Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

xv

Chapter 1

Profiling Developmental Learning for Students with Additional Needs (SWANs) Patrick Griffin

1.1  Introduction At the beginning of the SWANs project, it was estimated that almost 600,000 Australian people have an intellectual disability (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2003) and of these approximately 360,000 were between the ages of 5 and 18 years. In addition, there was a growing incidence and identification of autism, Down syndrome and other genetic disorders, indicating a corollary need to assist schools, teachers and support professionals to educate students with a wide range of disabilities including intellectual and developmental disability. Traditionally, there have been numerous attempts to assess students with intellectual disability based on the measurement of intelligence (IQ) or diagnosis of a medical condition associated with a syndrome (e.g., Down syndrome, Fragile X). The American Association on Mental Retardation (1992) defined intellectual disability as sub-average intellectual functioning linked with impairment in adaptive behavior. The Association’s definition placed emphasis on three key areas – intellectual functioning measured by IQ scores, difficulties in adaptive behaviour, and onset before age 18  – but later shifted so that less reliance was placed upon IQ scores and increasing attention was paid to functional and environmental considerations. This was appropriate, when the many degrees and manifestations of intellectual disability are taken into account. Persons who are severely intellectually disabled are able to learn only the most basic skills. Those who are mildly intellectually disabled can learn so much that, as adults, some are no longer identified as having a disability. Intellectual disability is not a single ‘disease’ or brain disorder. Nor is it a static condition that, once diagnosed in infancy, may not alter by puberty. IQ tests do not encompass current educational thinking about individual differences, unique learning styles and practical aspects of demonstrating appropriate P. Griffin (*) Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Griffin, K. Woods (eds.), Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56596-1_1

1

2

P. Griffin

social behaviours in various contexts. In the Australian state of Victoria, the first context for the SWANs research, students in mainstream schooling are assessed against curriculum-based frameworks of learning that describe the knowledge, skills and behaviours that are considered essential to prepare them for further education, work and life, and the developmental standards through which they might be expected to progress. However, at the beginning of the SWANs research these standards did not extend to describe expected developmental pathways for students with intellectual disability and other additional learning needs. Rather, in each school and for each student a program support group, comprising the student (where feasible), parents or carers, school principal and class teachers, worked to identify patterns of strengths, skills and abilities for the student. This relied very strongly on the judgment and expertise of the people who formed the support group which, in the integrated classroom or smaller schools, was too often limited to experience of relatively few students with similar disabilities. In contrast to students in mainstream schooling without additional learning needs, there was minimal systematic information about expected developmental standards or effective intervention strategies available to assist teachers in planning an appropriate curriculum-based instructional program for students with intellectual disability and additional needs. In Australia, schools are required by legislation to enrol students with a range of disabilities. Indeed, the Disability Standards for Education 2005 set out the obligation of schools to ensure that students with disability have access to educational opportunities without experiencing discrimination (Australian Government, 2005). Most teachers in mainstream schools can expect to have at least one student with a disability in their class each year. As we embarked on the SWANs research, it was clear that there was a widespread need for work that could support schools and teachers to meet their obligations to students. To meet the expectations set out in the Disability Standards for Education 2005, it was important that our work focused on learning areas prioritized for all Australian students. Several dimensions of knowledge, skill, and behavior had been identified in the national curriculum guidelines as important general capabilities for all students (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2013). The general capabilities encompassed literacy, numeracy, ICT capability, personal and social capability, critical and creative thinking, and ethical and intercultural understanding (ACARA). They were conceived as an integrated set of skills and behaviours that students build and use in their learning and, more broadly, in their lives and community participation. Schools were charged with the responsibility to assess and teach these capabilities, blended within learning areas, for all students including those who have disabilities (ACARA). Indeed, the Australian Disability Standards for Education 2005 obliged schools to ensure their students with disabilities could access and participate in educational opportunities and experiences on the same basis as students without disabilities to the fullest extent possible. While asserting the rights of students with disability to equitable access to curriculum and learning opportunities, however, it was widely acknowledged that some students require adjustments to the levels of complexity of the general capabilities

1  Profiling Developmental Learning for Students with Additional Needs (SWANs)

3

identified in the school curriculum and also to the ways in which they are taught. By extension, teachers and schools required support to understand how to assess and teach these important capabilities to students whose capacity to learn is impeded or complicated by disability. The form and extent of these adjustments to the methods of assessment and teaching are likely to vary with the form and severity of disability experienced by individual students, and with the special education experience and knowledge of teachers. However, like the teacher and teacher candidate described in the preface to this book, many teachers have little or no formal training in working with students with disability and additional learning needs and they struggle to support the learning of these students. There was an urgent need to provide teachers with guidance about appropriate goals and intervention strategies for students with a range of disabilities. So, based on both personal observation and review of literature together with policy and school environments, there appeared to be a need to develop and validate a framework and procedures to support the identification and understanding of the learning needs of students with additional needs across areas of skill and understanding identified in the national curriculum documents as general capabilities and as priority learning areas in the Victorian Curriculum. Further, there was a need to define a set of developmental continua describing learning for students with additional learning needs in specified areas of skill and understanding, and to identify effective intervention strategies that accelerate student progress along the developmental continua and examine how these relate to types of additional learning needs, teachers’ special education knowledge and experience, and school context. Finally, there was a need to monitor teacher adoption rate of such approaches to assessment and intervention in both mainstream and special education schools. In its first phase, the research took an innovative approach to measurement of development among students with additional needs, although one that is well-­ grounded in current work on assessment of standards of learning for students without disability in mainstream schools. The challenge for educators was to identify students’ emerging skills and to scaffold that learning by providing appropriate and timely intervention (Vygotsky, 1996). A primary aim was the development of an assessment protocol based on a functional (not aged-based or norm-referenced) profile that provides guidelines for teachers on targeted intervention strategies to assist the education of students with a range of additional needs. The research design was based on a model for defining competence-based frameworks (Griffin, Smith, & Martin, 2003). It relied on a specialist panel of subject matter experts (in this case, experienced special education teachers) emulating a partial credit latent trait model (Masters, 1982) to define the relative discriminating power of components of complex observation structures in a range of settings. The procedure had been evaluated (e.g., Griffin, Gillis, & Calvitto, 2004a) and shown to approximate item response partial credit model outcomes. In the past decades, developmental progressions have been defined in almost every area of learning. However, assessment procedures for students with intellectual disability and additional learning needs have remained primarily norm-­ referenced. While norm-referenced monitoring is important for funding and

4

P. Griffin

legislative purposes, it is recognised that the skills and social development of students with additional needs must also be monitored for development of tailored instructional programs. The approach thus drew on the practical expertise of subject matter experts and combined profiling with the work of specialist teachers of students with additional learning needs. This was expected to make the results available to all teachers of students with additional needs, whether they were working in mainstream classes or specialist schools. The project also studied the efficacy of a monitoring structure to assist teachers in planning, assessment and reporting to teachers, parents, and students. It provided a standard communication procedure across schools, classes, and teachers. Internationally, this extends work attempted by Griffin, Smith, and Ridge (2001) for North American schools when mainstream profiles were adapted to special education classes. The work reinforced an understanding that a student with a disability should not be considered a ‘less developed’ version of his or her mainstream peers, but rather as a student who has ‘developed differently’ (Vygotsky, 1993, p.  30) with idiosyncratic patterns of strengths and abilities. As such, assessment and report materials developed for mainstream students are likely to prove inadequate to the task of supporting the education of many students with additional needs. Moreover, assessment instruments and report formats used for students with additional needs are often interpreted in ways that make sense to clinicians, but not to teachers, students, or parents. An intent of this work was to collaborate closely with school leaders and teachers to ensure that all materials could be used and interpreted with ease by classroom teachers and did not demand specialist expertise. Borrowing from the work of special education teachers and subject matter experts, workshops were organized to examine materials and observations and draft statements of competencies for defining developmental pathways. In this first phase of the research, we focused on skills in communication, language and literacy learning, social processes, and personal learning skills. A panel of subject matter experts was identified as an advisory group for the research, to be led by Karen Underwood and other representative of the Victorian Department of Education and Training. The group’s role was to assist in identifying evidence of development for purposes of observation and drafting statements in unambiguous, teacher-friendly language according to rubrics described by Griffin (2004). The evidence framework consisted of components (areas of interest), indicators (broad statements of observable behaviours) and developmental criteria (indicative of relative performance quality). The latter are specific, ordered categories or standards describing how well actions or tasks are demonstrated. This process was based on a procedure later outlined by Griffin, Robertson, and Francis (2018). Panels of specialist subject matter experts critiqued components, indicators, and criteria relevant to their areas of expertise, and reviewed all materials with the intention of making changes and incidentally developing a sense of ownership. The panels offered critical appraisal as a means of revising indicators and structure of the framework. Next, teachers used draft surveys based on the indicators and criteria (i.e., rubrics) to record their observations of students with additional learning needs. These were piloted with a small sample of students to identify flaws, operating

1  Profiling Developmental Learning for Students with Additional Needs (SWANs)

5

procedures, ease of use, communication capacity, planning and curriculum implications, and gaps or redundancies. It was important at each step in the process to ascertain the workload for teachers and seek their advice regarding how materials are best used in classrooms. The instruments were used by independent observers, teachers, principals and specialists, initially as a questionnaire or observation survey format in which items represented indicators and response choices  – developmental criteria. Observers chose the criterion that best represented a student’s performance for each indicator. Choices were then coded as a partial credit scale and calibrated using the Rasch (1960) model. The calibration sample had to be sufficiently large and representative of the target population to ascertain how each indicator performed. This is a confirmatory approach using the multi-dimensional partial credit model (Eq.  1.1). Analyses were undertaken on indicators including differential item functioning (an examination of bias) and fit to the model. This was a core part of the project, involving mathematical modeling of indicators and estimation of student ability against item demand and discrimination. A probabilistic developmental Rasch partial credit model (Masters, 1982) was used to examine cohesion of developmental criteria and their mapping onto developmental continua. The analysis empirically identified the number and nature of the continua. Each indicator (i) can be described in terms of a set of k ordered categories that describe the level of quality exhibited in student performance. The indicators were collected into D cohesive groups called strands or dimensions. The Multidimensional Random Coefficients Multinomial Logit (MRCML) model (Adams, Wilson, & Wang, 1997) was used to estimate student ability within each strand as shown below: Pr  X ik  1; A; b;  /   



exp bik  aik  ki

 exp  b   a   ij





j 0

(1.1)

 ij



where θ′ = (θ1, θ2, ⋯θD) is a vector of ability parameters, one on each of D latent dimensions representing strands or dimensions of development profiles. This enabled the team to examine and confirm the range of different developmental pathways. The item (or indicator) parameters are modeled through a vector ξ′ = (ξ1, ξ2, ⋯, ξP) of P parameters. A design vector, aik, (i = 1,…,I; k = 0,1,…,Ki), links each item response to indicator parameters ξ and bik is the identity of indicator i score category k. The dimensions were expressed as traits represented by indicative behaviors, and were used to model developmental processes even when these processes were embedded in components of a single complex task or a series of interrelated observation schedules used by teachers. Earlier work on profiling (Griffin, 1990) illustrated that a simple logistic model (Rasch, 1960) could be used to identify underlying latent traits in teacher observations of literacy and numeracy in mainstream classrooms. This was repeated with profiles of second language development (Griffin

6

P. Griffin

et al., 2003). The current project extended the work into the domain of developmental learning among students with additional needs and employed a measurement methodology seeking empirical confirmation of the multidimensionality of the developmental domains. The model was implemented through the computer software ConQuest (Wu, Adams, & Wilson, 1998), which allowed for a family of models, including facets and multi-dimensional models, to be fitted. Quality criteria were plotted according to increasing demand using the approach published by Griffin, Woods, and Dulhunty (2004b). Levels of progressive development were identified from the data, defined by subject matter experts and verified by the specialist panel. These were then back translated (Griffin, Woods & Dulhunty) as a validity check. The hypothesized and derived frameworks were directly compared, and back translation afforded the opportunity for researchers to check the judgment-based framework against the empirically-derived framework. The extent of match was argued to be evidence of validity. When linked to person and item separation indices (Wright & Masters, 1983) it added to the construct validity of the standards-referenced scales. At this stage, subject matter experts identified intervention strategies for each level. The extent to which they could do this was seen as a further source of evidence for validity. At the conclusion of the first phase of the SWANs research, observation surveys had been developed and trialed in schools by large samples of teachers. A series of studies had been undertaken to identify reliability of teacher judgments, and relationships of classroom practices, resources, teacher characteristics, and school context to student development. The project developed an online assessment and reporting program that teachers in both mainstream and special education schools use to record their observations of student learning in these skill domains, report and monitor student progress over time, and link information about student proficiency to instructional advice.1 This phase of the SWANs research took more than 3  years and yielded three doctoral studies (Coles-Janess & Griffin, 2009; Roberts & Griffin, 2009; Woods, 2010; Woods & Griffin, 2013). The second phase of the project was even more ambitious. It extended the work to include additional learning areas as part of four further doctoral studies, tailored a version of the materials for use in early childhood settings, and engaged schools and teachers from other Australian states and territories. The SWANs materials are provided to Victorian schools as part of the Abilities Based Learning and Education Support (ABLES) resources for students with additional needs (Victorian Department of Education and Training, 2019). From their release at the start of 2011 to the end of 2018, they had been used in 2276 Australian schools to monitor learning for almost 50,000 students. The emphasis of the SWANs research was the design and validation of protocols for assessment and reporting to inform teachers’ planning and implementation of learning programs for students with additional needs. It did not focus on the nature,

1  Access to the SWANs program and materials can be obtained via the Assessment Research Centre at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

1  Profiling Developmental Learning for Students with Additional Needs (SWANs)

7

diagnosis, or treatment of disabilities but instead strove to help teachers recognize every student as a learner, regardless of the nature or severity of disability and the way that might complicate or impede learning. The project design relied on the input of a specialist panel of experienced teachers of students with additional needs working within the framework of a partial credit latent trait model (Masters, 1982) to define the relative discriminating power of components of complex observation structures in a range of settings. It drew together the work of assessment specialists, school leaders and teachers, specialist professionals, and curriculum and policy leaders. Other chapters in this volume provide details of the seven SWANs doctoral studies and their conversion to the ABLES curriculum and support resources.

References Adams, R. J., Wilson, M., & Wang, W. (1997). The multidimensional random coefficients multinomial logit model. Applied Psychological Measurement, 21, 1–23. American Association on Mental Retardation. (1992). Mental retardation: Definition, classification and systems of support (9th ed.). Washington, DC: AAMR. Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2013). General capabilities in the Australian Curriculum. Retrieved 4 August 2013, from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/GeneralCapabilities/Pdf/Overview Australian Government. (2005). Disability standards for education, 2005 [Electronic version]. Retrieved 18 September 2019, from https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2005L00767/ Download Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2003). Disability prevalence and trends. (Disability series. AIHW Cat. No. DIS 34). Canberra, Australia: AIHW. Coles-Janess, B., & Griffin, P. (2009). Mapping transitions in interpersonal learning for students with additional needs. Australasian Journal of Special Education, 33(2), 141–150. Griffin, P. (1990). Profiling literacy development: Monitoring the accumulation of reading skills. Australian Journal of Education, 43(3), 290–311. Griffin, P. (2004, September). The comfort of competence and the uncertainty of assessment. Invited address to the conference of Hong Kong Principals, Hong Kong. Griffin, P., Francis, M., & Robertson, P. (2018). Judgment-based assessment. In P. Griffin (Ed.), Assessment for teaching. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press. Griffin, P., Gillis, S., & Calvitto, L. (2004a). Connecting competence and quality: Scored assessment in Year 12 VET. Report to the NSW Department of Education. Griffin, P., Smith, P. G., & Martin, L. (2003). Profiles in English as a second language. Clifton Hill, Canada: Robert Andersen & Associates. Griffin, P., Smith, P. G., & Ridge, N. (2001). The literacy profiles in practice: Toward authentic assessment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Griffin, P., Woods, K., & Dulhunty, M. (2004b). Australian students’ knowledge and understanding of Asia. Australian Journal of Education, 48(3), 253–267. Masters, G. (1982). A Rasch model for partial credit scoring. Psychometrica, 47, 149–174. Rasch, G. (1960). Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests. Copenhagen, Denmark: Danmarks Paedagogiske Institut. Roberts, E., & Griffin, P. (2009). Profiling transitions in emotional development for students with additional learning needs. Australasian Journal of Special Education, 33(2), 151–161. Victorian Department of Education and Training. (2019). Abilities Based Learning and Education Support (ABLES). Retrieved 23 September 2019 from https://www.education.vic.gov.au/ school/teachers/learningneeds/Pages/ables.aspx

8

P. Griffin

Vygotsky, L. (1993). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 2: The fundamentals of defectology (abnormal psychology and learning disabilities) (R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton, Trans.). New York: Plenum Press. Vygotsky, L. (1996). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Woods, K. (2010). The design and validation of measures of communication and literacy to support the instruction of students with learning disabilities. Doctoral thesis. The University of Melbourne, Australia. Woods, K., & Griffin, P. (2013). Judgment-based performance measures of literacy for students with additional needs: Seeing students through the eyes of experienced special education teachers. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 20(3), 325–348. Wright, B., & Masters, G. (1983). Rating scale analysis. Chicago: MESA Press. Wu, M. L., Adams, R. J., & Wilson, M. R. (1998). ConQuest: Generalised item response modeling software. Melbourne, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research. Patrick Griffin  held the Chair of Education (Assessment) at The University of Melbourne and was the founding director of the Assessment Research Centre. His work includes more than 40 years in teaching and research in education measurement. He focuses on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for performance assessment, problem solving and higher order competency assessment and performance reporting. He was the measurement team leader for UNESCO in the SACMEQ project and a World Bank consultant in Vietnam, Philippines and China. He retired from the University of Melbourne in 2015. He still leads several national and international studies of problem solving, literacy and numeracy and was the Executive Director of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project in which he pioneered the assessment of collaborative problem solving. His research into reliable rubrics is on display through the doctoral students’ work in this volume on the work with special needs students.

Chapter 2

Competence Assessment Patrick Griffin

2.1  Introduction Competence assessments encourage and entice educators to draw ‘can do’ conclusions about student learning. It is common to describe students’ progress in terms of things they are now able to do that they could not once do, and we commonly use ‘can do’ statements to describe competences: ‘can add, subtract, read….’ There is seduction to such statements and we are drawn into believing that these competences can be assessed by simple observation of people performing specific tasks. Such an approach is based on a belief that certainty can be attained in describing human ability and development. This chapter argues that a probabilistic model of competence can link three fundamental approaches to teaching and learning and provide an appropriate framework for reporting. This is especially important when goals of education include such things as creativity, teamwork, communication and other somewhat difficult attributes to observe in action. What is clear is that there are specific prerequisite matters that need to be attended to in developing a competence-­based approach to assessment. 1. Specify with greater clarity the desirable outcomes of education programs. These outcomes must include a broad range of cognitive, interpersonal, communication and higher-order skills and will need to address the kinds of general competencies identified in national goals of schooling such as those recently espoused in Australia. 2. Specify frameworks, which make clear what is meant by developing competence or achievement. These need to be used as frames of reference for interpreting assessment and identifying how to improve learning.

P. Griffin (*) Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Griffin, K. Woods (eds.), Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56596-1_2

9

10

P. Griffin

3. Systematic assessments are needed to supplement the need for reporting in a meaningful way to parents and other stakeholders in education. Inference is fundamental to all assessment. We are required to ‘leap’ to the unobservable (an individual’s underlying trait) from the observable (performance in particular situations). Rather than attempting ‘can/cannot do’ conclusions about outcomes, the purpose of assessment is more likely to be to infer a student’s level of achievement on a developmental continuum that itself represents a manifestation of an underlying trait. The purpose generally will not be to make ‘can do’ statements in relation to learning. The developmental model of competence takes a probabilistic approach to describing learning development.

2.2  Measurement In the 1960s two developments provided new approaches to the interpretation of assessments. Later in the 1980s, when powerful, accessible computing technology became involved, the real value of the new approaches became apparent. A Danish mathematician Rasch (1980) developed the concept of underlying growth continua, or latent traits. He reasoned that the nature of these traits could be defined by the tasks that students performed; if the tasks were to be arranged in order of their increasing amounts of attribute required (capacity), then the nature of the trait was defined by the nature and order of the tasks. Development of learning or competence could be traced by progress along the trait or growth continuum. In another development, Glaser (1963) put forward the notion of criterion-­ referenced assessment. This, like Rasch’s approach, also described performance and development in terms of the nature and order of tasks performed. Initially, when criterion-referenced interpretation of assessment was used, the observation was referred (or compared) directly to a single, fixed level of achievement or prespecified criterion. If this level of performance was demonstrated, it was interpreted in terms of either mastery or non-mastery, referenced to a single cut-off score. Only one threshold was used. Glaser (1963) originally used the term ‘criterion’ to refer to a defined domain (area) of content or behaviour to which the test items are referenced. Despite its attraction in separating the individual’s performance from those of his or her peers, the can/cannot or mastery/non-mastery interpretation can and did, for more than a decade, reduce the assessment to a level of trivia or to a checklist of unrelated and non-cohesive sets of skills that were of little use in instructional terms. It led Glaser, who had defined criterion referencing in 1963, to expand on his original statement and clarify the purpose for criterion referencing. Glaser advised that the ‘mastery/ non mastery’ tasks should be ordered in coherent sets that lead to an overall interpretation of proficiency or competence. Glaser (1981) argued that criterion referencing should ‘encourage the development of procedures whereby assessments of proficiency could be referred to stages

2  Competence Assessment

11

along progressions of increasing competence’ (p. 935). Competence development is therefore described and interpreted in terms of a progression of tasks, or stages of developmental competence. There was also no need to define tasks as having only one outcome, approach or solution, and there was no need to restrict the tasks to paper-and pencil exercises that are scored in a predetermined way. Judgment can be used in interpreting performance on more complex tasks, which can be ordered in terms of the competence required to undertake them. The performance then can be interpreted in terms, not only of the tasks undertaken, but also of the manner in which they were completed. When defined this way, criterion referenced interpretation involves the description of the individual or group performance in terms of the tasks undertaken and the behaviors displayed. A criterion then becomes a threshold on the developmental continuum rather than the domain of content. The person’s performance and the task are both interpreted by their relative position on a continuum. This has important implications for teachers and for curriculum developers. It also helps others to share the teachers’ insights into student learning and the context in which the learning tasks have to be completed. Increasingly it is common to have easily understood and available progressions of increasing competence developing into a communication framework for all parties in the criterion referenced assessment. Two other developments have made criterion referenced interpretation procedures easier to use. The first is a generalization of the idea of testing. Instead of being seen as paper-and- pencil exercises that predominantly focus on cognitive tasks, tests can now be represented as tasks or procedures performed under specified conditions. The second is the availability of powerful microcomputers, which allow analyses that could not be carried out some 40 years ago when Glaser first formulated criterion referencing. Measurement in education and psychology is not as readily accepted as is measurement in physical terms. Physical measurement is generally considered to be independent of the measuring instrument. For example, the length of an object does not depend on which kind of ruler is used. The change from measuring in inches to measuring in centimetres does not change the length of a line. If different rulers are used, each with a different unit of measurement, it is a simple transformation to convert the measure from one ruler to that from another without changing the length of the object provided each has a unit of measurement that is repetitive within the context of the act of measurement. This characteristic is called the specific objectivity of measurement. Attempts to develop systems of cognitive and educational measurement that emulate the features of physical measurement are not new. Thurstone (1925) and Thorndike (1929) proposed a measurement system for the assessment of mental ability and development based on a scaling procedure applied to discrete-point test items. Various others worked on developing mathematical models of measurement and the simplest is a family of latent-trait models that use the statistical characteristics of a group’s response to a set of items to determine the measurement scale. These methods have been collectively grouped under the heading ‘latent trait models’. The traits are hidden (or latent). By their construction and interpretation,

12

P. Griffin

they help us to interpret or understand observations; there is no implication that they exist in any physical or physiological sense or that they cause the behavior they describe. This is also true of competence definitions: the descriptions of competence help us to observe and interpret behaviors exhibited by people in performing tasks. The competence is defined and constructed by us to help us discriminate between students on the basis of skill. Each competence is a description that is used as an aid to observation and interpretation; it does not exist. When we apply statistical theory to data on these observations, we take the construction one step further. Now we have a statistical representation of a verbal description to assist in interpreting observations of learning. Latent traits are statistical constructs derived from empirical relationships among records of observations of peoples’ behaviours. So too are empirically defined competences. Analyses of performance information focuses on the nature of the tasks performed, the difficulty of the tasks and the way they separate those with more of the trait from those with less of it (task discrimination). So, the task involved defining the progressions of increasing demand in order to infer the invariant latent construct underpinning the observed progression. According to Wright and Linacre (1989) quantitative observations are based on counting observed events or levels of performance. Meaningful measurement is based on the arithmetical properties of interval scales. The Rasch measurement model provides the necessary and sufficient means to transform ordinal counts into linear measures. Unlike traditional tests, the tasks do not necessarily have single, correct outcomes and, as they become more complex, criteria defining thresholds or levels of performance can be used. The theory is concerned with the relationship between the demands of a task and the capacity of the person to perform it. There is no restriction on the nature of the task and in the most general of the Rasch models (Linacre, 1990), there are very few restrictions on the scoring procedures. The task can be a test question, a set of multiple choice items, an essay, a performance, a speech, a product produced in class, an artistic rendition, a folio, a driving test, the dismantling and reassembling of a motor car engine, the building of a brick wall, a haircut given to a client, or whatever is related to some attribute of interest. The attribute could be ability, an attitude, a physical performance, a procedure, an interest, a set of values or a generalised competence in an area of learning. An advantage of the approach is its links to the arguments separately posited by Vygotsky (1934, 1962/1986), whose research may be interpreted as being driven by questions about the development of human beings and about the role that formal education plays in the process. The concept of internalisation provides the basic strategy for teaching higher order thinking and competence in inquiry. It is in the context of this broader conceptualisation of learning that we may interpret Vygotsky’s construct of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) – the zone in which an individual is able to achieve more with assistance than he or she can manage alone. Two expositions of the ZPD in his published work arose from two different immediate concerns: the assessment and placement of children who were “learning disabled” and the role of instruction in the development of scientific concepts (Vygotsky, 1934, 1962/1986). Simply put, the ZPD is “a state of readiness

2  Competence Assessment

13

in which a student will be able to make certain kinds of conceptual connections, but not others; anything too simple for the student will quickly become boring; anything too difficult will quickly become demoralising” (Burbules, 1993, p. 122). From the point of view of the teacher-student relationship, the teacher needs to be able to identify “the state of readiness” of the student in the context of the domain of learning being mastered. These ideas have affected pedagogical practice particularly as evidenced in studies on ‘modelling’ and ‘scaffolding’. Interestingly, the measurement theories of Rasch are also consistent with Vygotsky’s approach. Glaser’s words “stages along progressions of increasing competence” are of immense importance in competence assessment, whether it is in assessing Basic Competencies or any other form of competence. Criterion referenced interpretation now incorporates Vygotsky’s ZPD and this is formalised when the two ideas are linked to item response theory applications in assessment. Combining these ideas directly links the position of a person or an item on a developmental continuum (as shown in a variable map) to an interpretation of what a student, or groups of students, can learn (with assistance), rather than focusing on a score or the performance relative to a percentage or a group. It gives a substantive interpretation to the measurement for reporting purposes rather than relying on a score or grade. The procedure gives meaning to test scores and enables them to be interpreted in terms of Glaser’s levels of increasing competence. A weakness of the method is its reliance on a small number of specialists in item response or latent trait analysis. The underlying latent traits are first examined using a system called variable maps as shown in Fig. 2.1. These are generated using any number of Rasch model computer software packages. It can be seen that several test items group together at different points along the scale and a major question is whether these clusters can be interpreted as having something in common. Each item is reviewed for the skills involved in responding to the item and is a matter of substantive interpretation. The process requires an understanding or empathy with ‘how the students think’ when they are responding to the items. Experienced teachers are very good at this and those dealing with language instruction, and who are accustomed to dealing with a marking scheme, can readily interpret the levels on a developmental continuum underpinning a test. A variable map shows that items can be grouped according to similar difficulty levels. Given that the ability of the students is matched to the difficulty of the items and the items and students are mapped onto the same scale, the students can be grouped within the same ‘ability’ range adjacent to the items that have similar difficulty levels. This grouping of items (and students) identifies a kind of ‘transition point’, where an increase of item difficulty is associated with a change in the kind of cognitive skill required to achieve a correct answer. When ability and difficulty are equal the odds of success are 50/50. From this it can be deduced that, if the student were to improve a little, he or she would have a better than even (50/50) chance of succeeding on items in this group. It could be argued that the main task of a teacher is to increase the odds of success in each of these competence levels to greater than 50/50. This leads to an understanding of the kinds of skills being demonstrated by students at each level on the continuum.

14

P. Griffin

Fig. 2.1  Variable map of a 60 item reading test

Moreover, the odds of 50/50 at the transition points could be linked to a change in the required cognitive skill and this could be directly translated into an implication for teaching. It is in fact the zone of proximal development defined by Vygotsky. Discussions with curriculum specialists need to take place to identify the kind of instruction needed to progress the student on the variable. A summary description of these skills can then be assigned to each item and student group. The first point (item grouping) is justified on statistical and conceptual grounds if the items have behaved in a cohesive manner that enables an interpretation of a variable underpinning the test. This is sometimes described as a Rasch-like manner because it is also a requirement of the Rasch model analysis. The second point (labelling the skills) is based on conceptual rather than on statistical grounds and is based on a skills audit. To achieve this outcome the difficulty measures of the items are sorted in increasing magnitude. Each assessment task also needs to be analysed for the underpinning cognitive skill involved in obtaining the correct answer. The results of these analyses for a reading test are presented in Table 2.1. In this example, the difficulties of the test items (logits) were also plotted in increasing order of difficulty and the sets of items were examined to identify specific clusters or groupings. The two criteria described above were used. First, there

2  Competence Assessment

15

Table 2.1  Skills audit for each of the 60 reading test items Item # 41 54 58 26 21 48 44 34 33 3 55 30 60 57 40 43 38 22 45 51 9 39 14

Logit 4.2 4.0 3.8 3.8 3.5 3.4 3.3 3.1 3.1 3.0 2.8 2.7 2.7 2.7 2.7 2.4 2.4 2.4 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.2 2.2

50 53 59 1 13 42 47 4 49 17 10 8 27 25 23 12 29

2.1 2.1 2.1 2.0 2.0 2.0 1.9 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.7 1.6 1.5 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.3

Cognitive skill underpinning correct response Link a concept to a visual stimulus and bring outside knowledge to the solution Combining several ideas and using outside knowledge Combining several ideas, requiring interpretation beyond text level Combining several ideas Combining several ideas and using outside knowledge Understanding figurative meaning of word (format-negative question) Understanding author’s main purpose on the basis of title Requiring interpretation beyond text level, unfamiliar topic Deducing meaning from context Combining several ideas Understanding main idea, choosing a title Inferring meaning from context (format-negative question) Understanding figurative meaning Locating specific information from text Locating specific information from text Locating specific information from text Locating specific information from text (too many details in long options) Locating specific information from text Locating specific information from text Locating specific information from text Integrating reading and math skills Locating information from text and illustration Locating information from text (understanding signal words-“prediction” in the stem) Inferring meaning from context (option d attracts some above average students) Locating information from context Understanding author’s main purpose Match exact words and paraphrase from Chinese origin Locating information from text (format – negative question) Locating information from text Understanding implications Understanding implications Locating information from text Understanding meaning of sentences Understanding meaning of vocabulary Integrating reading and math skills Understanding meaning of sentences Locating information from text Locating information from text Locating information from text (format-negative questions, using background) Locating information from text (continued)

16

P. Griffin

Table 2.1 (continued) Item # 31 15 7 56 11 5 18 19 28 37 2 46 24 52 6 36 16 32 35

Logit 1.2 1.1 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.9 0.8 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.1 0.0 0.0

Cognitive skill underpinning correct response Locating information from text Understanding meaning of words Locating information from text Locating information from text Locating information from text Understanding author’s main purpose Locating information from text Understanding relationship between events in text Locating information from text Locating information from text Locating information from text Understanding relationship between events in text Understanding meaning of word Locating information from text Locating information from text Matching word and visual stimulus Exact match of text with adjacent text Match exact words and paraphrase Matching word and visual stimulus

have to be identifiable sets of items and these sets need to have a common substantive interpretation of the underpinning skill. Grouping items on the variable map is a first step, but it is imprecise because of the constraints of printers and line feeds and this may place some items with different difficulty on the same physical line merely because of a hardware restriction. Nevertheless it is a good first step, as an inspection of the variable map can often identify broad categories and clusters. The chart in Fig. 2.2 illustrates where the difficulty of items changed. The question then arose that if the difficulty increased for sets of items, did the nature of the underpinning competence level also alter? The two sets of information were explored in unison. Natural breaks in difficulty were a set with a common substantive interpretation could be found. A panel of curriculum specialists joined the item writers for this exercise. Together they identified the breaks in the variable and offered the substantive interpretation of the levels of competence. These have been presented in Fig. 2.3. Despite the obvious link from assessment to teaching and the ZPD, not everyone is able to use the information at this level. Comments such as this teacher response were commonly encountered: “These test results, competence levels and curriculum materials are interesting, but how are they used?” That particular remark illustrated the importance of professional development linked to an assessment and reporting program.

17

2  Competence Assessment logit 4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0

35 32 16 6 36 52 24 46 2 37 28 19 18 5 11 56 7 15 31 29 12 23 25 27 8 10 17 4 49 47 42 13 1 59 53 50 14 39 9 51 45 22 38 43 40 57 30 60 55 3 33 34 44 48 21 26 58 54 41

Fig. 2.2  Relative difficulties of reading items and cut points for competence levels

Reading Skill Levels Level 1

Matches text at word or sentence level aided by pictures. Restricted to a limited range of vocabulary linked to pictures

Level 2

Locates text expressed in short repetitive sentences and can deal with text unaided by pictures. Type of text is limited to short sentences and phrases with repetitive patterns.

Level 3

Reads and understands longer passages. Can search backwards or forwards through text for information. Understands paraphrasing. Expanding vocabulary enables understanding of sentences with some complex structure.

Level 4

Links information from different parts of the text. Selects and connects text to derive and infer different possible meanings.

Level 5

Links inferences and identifies an author’s intention from information stated in different ways, in different text types and in documents where the message is not explicit.

Level 6

Combines text with outside knowledge to infer various meanings. Identifies an author’s purpose, attitudes, values, beliefs, motive, unstated assumptions and arguments.

Fig. 2.3  Interpretation of the reading levels from the analysis of reading item sets

18

P. Griffin

Both pre-service and in-service teacher education programs will be central and new teaching methods will be needed to accommodate the links between criterion referencing, item response modelling and the zone of proximal development. Before this can be successful, teacher education programs will need assistance to broaden their program beyond the focus on the central curriculum model and related teaching plans and to incorporate methods of developing the classroom teachers’ skills in combining these three theories. Teaching and assessment strategies need to be merged and specific teaching strategies developed for each zone of proximal development. Teachers also need help to make the transition. Team teaching, cross level tutoring, teacher mentoring for less confident and competent teachers are essential strategies. If, for example, Hill and Crevola’s strategies (1999) were implemented such that the weakest teacher in a school can be mentored and helped to improve to even the average level for the school and if this translates to student achievement, the impact on the system would be enormous. For students, placement and diagnostic testing need to be much more widely used provided that their interpretation leads to targeted intervention for all students. The image of diagnostic testing is that it is for remedial teaching, but this needs to be broadened to targeted instruction for all levels of reading and mathematics. This leads automatically to the next section in this discussion- the link of teaching to learning outcomes and competence levels.

2.3  Instructional Implications Overhauling the instructional agenda to cater for different levels of achievement and learning style is a large task and one that will take time. It is more than the procedural tasks outlined in the above discussion. Each of these is constructive but none of them answer the teacher’s question. Early readers need activities like a listening centre, pocket charts, enlarged texts (such as those being developed through the UNICEF in its global approach to Education for All (EFA)), word walls, poem boxes, buddy reading. Higher level readers are encouraged by literature or book circles, directed reading, semantic webs, sketches and other innovative approaches. Where classes have students over a wide range of language competence the whole class approach is inappropriate. The example provided in Fig. 2.4 focuses on reading instruction and the examples are taken from the Literacy Profiles by Griffin, Smith and Ridge (2001) or by Griffin, Smith and Martin (2003). A similar analysis of teaching strategies could well be done for the range of competence levels in mathematics, and this could well be a part of the training modules developed elsewhere. At a system level, this has further implications. If changes in teaching are required then it is also true that changes in resource provision are involved and this is turn has implications for policy development. Teachers need assistance to use the theories in their teaching without the specialised theoretical and computer training that all this implies. A simple procedure that we have developed for teachers (Griffin,

2  Competence Assessment

Derived Competence Statement

19

Possible Teaching Activities

Level 1: Matches text at word or sentence level aided by pictures. Restricted to a limited range of vocabulary linked to i Level 2: Locates text ex-

Reading conferences, logs kept by students, shared reading, retelling, drama activities based on reading. Books sorted into difficulty levels and students practice by reading aloud, reading to other students, parents, use ‘take-home’ books, di bto,hwith and h by thed studentsdiin the i class l reading ii Reading

pressed in short repetitive sentences and can deal with text unaided by pictures. Type of text is limited to short sen-

centre. Shared reading with other students, parents, use ‘take-home’ books, reading by the teacher to students, guided reading and predicting stories with simple repetitive language pattern and picture-rich reading texts, repeatedly

Level 3: Reads and understands longer passages. Can search backwards or forwards through text to for information. Understands paraphrasing. Expanding vocabulary enables Level 4: Links information from different parts of the text. Selects and connects text to derive and infer different possible meanings.

Comparing books and stories, identifying features, exploring common patterns using reading circles, sustained reading activities, discussions with other students and parents and recording reading logs and discussions; role plays, portfolios, individual reading conferences, guided reading programs at the individual student level; retelling; and links to writing Guided reading, small-group reading activities reading circles, reading logs reading materials from community and from non-fiction, shared reading focusing on strategies for expository texts collected from a range of sources, and related to a range of curriculum learning areas; reading aloud,

Level 5: Links inferences and identifies an author's intention from information stated in different ways, in different text types and in documents Level 6: Combines text with outside knowledge to infer various meanings, including hidden meanings. Identifies an author's purposes, attitudes, values, beliefs, motives, unstated assumptions and arguments.

Reading targets in terms of the number and range of texts and text types. Non-fiction should be extensively used, unit and topic research activities as individual and group activities with work set for research at home and in the community. Critical analysis of text materials and evaluation of writer’s Shared, guided and independent reading of a broad range of text types and from a range of sources. Retelling and reading circles predominate in teaching styles and activities, sharing insights, clarifying intentions analysing and evaluating texts using a range of criteria such as style, clarity, impact on the reader and so on. Book clubs, think and know charts based on reading, drawing conclusions from a range of texts, following directions, drama workshops, reading and writing discussion groups, literature response portfolios text cohesion analysis sessions.

Fig. 2.4  Developmental levels (ZPDs) and intervention strategies

20

P. Griffin

2001a, 2001b) encompasses all of these theories and consists of the following steps. Teachers take just a few minutes to understand the approach using the following steps to adapt it to their teaching. 1. Describe the teaching and learning sequence that would facilitate learning through these three levels and devise a series of tasks that would track through the three levels. 2. Define the levels that are expected to develop. 3. Develop a set of specifications for the assessment task(s). 4. Identify the steps of the components of each task. 5. Anticipate, for each step, different quality of performance from different students. 6. Define codes for the different quality performances. 7. Put the codes on a continuum of increasing level of performance. 8. Identify clusters of codes and define overall levels of performance. 9. Interpret the clusters of codes using the performance rubrics. 10. Define the characteristic knowledge and skills for each level and interpret these in terms of readiness to learn. 11. Identify intervention strategies for each level. 12. Set target levels for mastery and/or competence. 13. Design a report that indicates achievement, readiness to learn and intervention. 14. Adapt the report to illustrate performance on a criterion, standards and norm referenced scales, as well as competence scale, and a norm referenced interpretation. There is no need for sophisticated computing or large scale survey testing work. The work of Rasch, Glaser and Vygotsky can all be incorporated into the teaching and assessment cycle of a teacher using some simple planning tools listed above.

2.4  Reporting The final stage is about telling parents, students and other teachers about the progress along the continuum. What does it all mean? A form of reporting that enables all three theories to be demonstrated is illustrated in Figs. 2.5 and 2.6. The report for the student is then generated to show how the performance is interpreted using the rubrics for segments as defined in Fig. 2.3. We assume that a criterion referenced analysis and interpretation needs a criterion referenced report format for the students and parents. There are two popular ways in which this is done. The first is an item level content analysis and was pioneered by the ACER. The second was pioneered by the Assessment Research Centre at the University of Melbourne and is called a profile approach. Both are Australian models of test interpretation. The first is an item analysis and a report on each item and success rates. The second is a profile approach whereby stages of increasing competence are defined

21

2  Competence Assessment

Student Rocket Report 2003 Swinburn College Report printed on 11 Mar 2004

Achievement Summary

Year Level: Class: Student: Teacher: Subject: Strand:

Level

H

Can describe actions being performed at the present time

2 A David Alki Mr John Peterson ESL ITESL

Achievement Summary

Can express definite future plans, Can give simple directions.

G

Can talk about the possessions of self and of other people. F Can describe routine activities and habitual actions, Can make simple offers and invitations.

E

D

identify common actions, such as eating, drinking, walking, sleeping, buying, talking, describe an action involving different people

Can make simple requests to satisfy basic needs, Can express notions of time and time sequences

C

B

Can name common objects, numbers, days, months, family and transport, colours and appearances

Can provide simple personal information and interests A

50% of class of students can be located within this range. The student is estimated to be at this location. Summary statements appear on this chart. More detailed reports are available elsewhere.

Fig. 2.5  An example of a criterion referenced report format at individual student level

22

P. Griffin

Class Report 2003 Swinburn College Report printed on 11 Mar 2004 A

B

C

Year Level: Class: Teacher: Subject: Strand: D

2 A Mr John Peterson ESL ITESL E F

G

Can name common Identify common actions, Can describe routine Can make simple Can provide simple Can talk about the Can describe actions personal information and objects, numbers, days, such as: eating,drinking, requests to satisfy basic activities and habitual possessions of self and being performed at the months, family and interests needs, Can express actions, Can make simple walking, sleeping, of other people. present time transport, colours and buying, talking, describe notions of time and time offers and invitations. appearances sequences an action involving different people

H Can express definite future plans, Can give simple directions.

Adam Wood Aimee Thomas Alex Benedict Christopher Chandler Daniel Kane Daniel Sigafoose David Alki David Grahling Derek Coleman Dustin Mcdonald Elizabeth Crawford Gregory Woroniuk Jared Roach John Mowbray Julie Williams Kim Lopresti Laura Murphy Martha Johnson Meredith Gooden Robert Caraballa Robert Oper Royce Krupic Seth Millen Tiffany Grimm

Fig. 2.6  An example of a criterion referenced report format at group level

and used for reporting procedures. The Assessment Research Centre now combines these two approaches and the combined method was published for the first time in 2004 in a World Bank report (Griffin, 2004). The advantage of the item level analysis alone is that the student receives a detailed report on the performance in the examination. The disadvantage is that, unless the subsequent examination is similar or identical, it can promote learning not conducive to a developmental progression. It can also lead to a trivialising of learning. The advantage of the second approach is that it transcends the actual content of any one test and allows the student to be assessed on the general construct being measured. It also indicates what standards are being used. The criterion report is shown in Fig. 2.5. When this is linked to an item content analysis the student can be given information about the variable being measured, the criterion levels and the item analysis. The figure illustrates a way of reporting at an individual student level on a criterion scale. The central axis of the diagram presents levels of increasing ability. This could be labeled with just letters or it could be labeled with the Rasch logit scale. To the right and left of the central spine of the diagram are descriptions of levels of increasing competence depending on an analysis of items that might be located at around those regions. The grey region in the middle of the central column indicates the inter- quartile range of students (i.e. the bottom of the grey box would be the 25th percentile the top of the grey box would be the 75th percentile). The dark line in the middle indicates the student’s level of achievement on this test. Interpretation of this chart shows that by reading to the left

2  Competence Assessment

23

and right of that line, it is possible to identify the skills that have been developed below that line and the skills not yet able to be demonstrated above that line. It also illustrates where the ZPD for the specific student is located. In an expansion of this diagram in Fig. 2.6 a class group is examined. This would be reported to the teacher not to students or parents, but it presents two pieces of information. Across the top of the chart is a listing of the skills and knowledge that have been demonstrated through responses to items in the examination. The left vertical axis presents students’ names. The grey shaded region in the centre of the chart is the inter-quartile range as presented before in the earlier chart. The histogram or the bars within the graph are presented as a dark grey and black column. These represent measures at time 1 and time 2. Plus, as students may undergo pre and post assessment in an action research agenda, it is possible to present both the pre- and the post-performance of the examinees in terms of the criterion referenced scale and developmental (ZPD) level demonstrated on the test. Figure 2.6 shows how students can be monitored over time and how many attempts at the examination can be monitored over time and their relative ability level can be monitored. The opportunity to give feedback is important. Given the issues raised in this paper, several conclusions can be drawn: 1. Definitive statements about student performance and capabilities cannot be made. It is only a probabilistic context. 2. Strategies need to be developed to enable probabilistic statements to be made about learning. 3. Item response modelling, criterion referenced interpretation and zones of proximal development come together in a single approach to teaching learning and assessment. 4. Assessment is best used to identify the intervention strategy associated with the ZPD. 5. Identification of the intervention strategy and the ZPD implies that different teaching strategies are needed for each ZPD and this in turn implies differential allocation of resources. 6. When this is applied at a system level the allocation of resources has implication for curriculum and resource policies. 7. Teachers can readily adapt the logic of the probabilistic models of assessment to develop and implement the criterion referenced, IRT and ZPD approaches to teaching assessment and learning in their classroom without large scale adoption of sophisticated computer models. 8. A criterion referenced and ZPD approach to teaching and assessment demands a reporting morel that enables this to be communicated to a range of stakeholders and reports that illustrate scores, grades or comments unrelated to the criterion, latent trait and proximal approach are of limited use.

24

P. Griffin

References Burbules, N. (1993). Dialogue in teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Glaser, R. (1963). Instructional technology and the measurement of learning outcomes: Some questions. American Psychologist, 18, 519–521. Glaser, R. (1981). The future of testing: A research agenda for cognitive psychology and psychometrics. American Psychologist, 36, 923–936. Griffin, P. (2001a). Students, take your marks! Get set – Learn! Keynote address at the New South Wales Chapter Conference of the Australian Council for Educational Administration, Mudgee. Griffin, P. (2001b). ALPS: Software support for the literacy profiles. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Griffin, P. (2004). Chapter 2: The construction and calibration of tests. In Volume 3. N. Postlethwaite, & P. Griffin et al. (Eds.), Achievement levels of Vietnamese primary students. Washington, DC: World Bank. Griffin, P., Smith, P., & Martin, L. (2003). Profiles in English as a second language. Portsmouth, NH: Heinneman. Griffin, P., Smith, P., et  al. (2001). The literacy profiles in practice: An assessment approach. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hill, P., & Crevola, C. (1999). The role of standards in educational reform in the 21st century. In D.  D. Marsh (Ed.), ASCD yearbook 1999: Preparing our schools for the 21st century (pp. 117–142). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Linacre, J.  M. (1990). Optimizing rating scale category effectiveness. Journal of Applied Measurement, 3(1), 125. Rasch, G. (1980). Some probabilistic models for the measurement of attainment and intelligence. Chicago: MESA Press. Thorndike, L. (1929). A method of scaling psychological and educational tests. Journal of Educational Psychology, 16, 433–449. Thurstone, E. L. (1925). The measurement of intelligence. New York: Columbia University. Vygotsky, L. (1934). Thinking and speaking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Written 1934: Edited and translated in 1962 by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wright, B., & Linacre, J. (1989). Observations are always ordinal, measurements, however, must be interval. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 89(2), 612–613. Patrick Griffin  held the Chair of Education (Assessment) at The University of Melbourne and was the founding director of the Assessment Research Centre. His work includes more than 40 years in teaching and research in education measurement. He focuses on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for performance assessment, problem solving and higher order competency assessment and performance reporting. He was the measurement team leader for UNESCO in the SACMEQ project and a World Bank consultant in Vietnam, Philippines and China. He retired in 2015. He still leads several national and international studies of problem solving, literacy and numeracy and was the Executive Director of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project in which he pioneered the assessment of collaborative problem solving. His research into reliable rubrics is on display through the doctoral students’ work in this volume on the work with special needs students.

Chapter 3

Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs Kerry Woods and Patrick Griffin

3.1  Introduction The first step in the SWANS research was to identify the policy and curriculum frameworks that had been established to guide education for all students, including students with disability and additional learning needs. We worked with our Department colleagues in every phase of the research to make sure our work and theirs fitted together and provided a well-integrated set of advice and resources for schools and teachers. Over time, that partnership extended to include Victorian, and later South Australian and West Australian, schools, teachers and specialist therapy staff who took an active role and close interest in different aspects of the design and validation of assessment materials, reporting formats, links to curriculum materials, and support advice. A second step, taken almost concurrently with the first, involved working with many school leaders and teachers to identify the questions they asked, and sometimes struggled to answer, as they planned and delivered learning programs for their students. Chief among these was the question of what each student knew and could do. Teachers explained that they needed to build their skills as observers of their students to gain a clear picture of the starting point for further teaching and learning. This guided our decision to build observational surveys for teachers, to help them identify and reflect on students’ competence. Another question was framed as ‘where to next?’ as teachers strove to identify instructional goals that were neither too challenging for students nor too easily achieved. This sat well with an approach to reporting based on progressions of increasingly challenging skills organised into achievement levels. The expectation was that, if teachers located a student on such a learning progression, they could take into consideration the breadth of skills represented at the student’s current level and those represented at the immediate next level as a basis for writing K. Woods (*) · P. Griffin Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Griffin, K. Woods (eds.), Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56596-1_3

25

26

K. Woods and P. Griffin

instructional goals. A final question posed by teachers shifted focus from what the student could do now and was ready to learn next and, instead, asked what an experienced teacher was likely to do to guide and support the student as a learner. This question prompted us to work with large teams of special educators and therapy specialists to build banks of teaching strategies linked to levels on the learning progressions. In this chapter, therefore, we describe the design of an integrated program of support for teachers of students with additional needs, and the way that program was checked and negotiated with teachers and school leaders at critical stages in the project. School leaders worked with their communities of family members, teachers, and therapy specialists to guide the process in a dynamic way and one that returned repeatedly to questions of utility of the materials to meet both education policy expectations and the aspirations that families held for their children. The examples given in the chapter describe the design of an assessment of functional communication skills for students with additional learning needs. Subsequent chapters explain the same process applied to a comprehensive range of other learning areas – literacy, numeracy, digital literacy, thinking and learning skills, movement, and social and emotional learning.

3.2  Designing the SWANs Communication Assessment The SWANs research focused on the design and validation of assessment and reporting instruments that describe student’s abilities, rather than their disabilities, across a range of learning areas. However, we recognised that the definition of a learning area needed to be specifically tailored to best meet the instructional needs of students. This was viewed as a form of adjustment to the curriculum learning area, and one that acknowledged the foundational nature of the skills and the way they could provide access to the regular curriculum. As a base for defining the learning domain of communication, for example, a distinction was first drawn between expressive forms of communication (e.g., the production of gesture, facial expression, use of symbolic representation in the form of speech, signing or writing) and receptive forms (e.g., interpretation of gesture and facial expression, listening, response to pictures or symbols). This helped ensure inclusiveness and relevance for students with a wide diversity of modes of communication. The equivalent curriculum learning area was identified as English Speaking and Listening (VCAA, 2019), but the emphasis on verbal communication was seen as unnecessarily narrow and restrictive. Instead, working with a steering group of experienced special educators, communication was broadly defined as the process of establishing meaning between people. This definition was chosen because it did not privilege the use of a particular medium or sensory system, but rather encompassed diversity in the means by which a student could demonstrate their skills and understanding. Part of our role as a research team was to identify theoretical frameworks to underpin assessment design. For the learning area of communication, this was built on definitions first established by Searle (1969) and Austin (1980), and their concept

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

27

of the speech act and of language and communication as complex, rule-governed forms of social behaviour. The intention was to describe the learning area in a manner that could be used to develop rubrics through description of capabilities that could, in turn, be expressed in terms of behaviours observable by teachers in everyday classroom interactions. Searle (1969, p. 16), for example, defined communication in terms of speech acts that could take the form of: making statements, giving commands, asking questions, making promises and so on; and more abstractly, acts such as referring and predicating … made possible by and performed in accordance with certain rules for the use of linguistic elements.

For Searle (1969, 2007), it was not an essential aspect of language that it be spoken. It was important, however, that to describe something as the use of language, whether spoken or not, it must be able to be translated to thought. He argued that the nature of language, and the question of the functions or uses of language as a means of communication, could not be separated. Similarly, for Austin (1980), a communicative act could not be analysed out of the context of its use, and its use must include the intention of the speaker and the interpretation by the addressee in the light of communication conventions. This definition acknowledged the importance of the functions of communication and the social conventions that supported them. Further, Bates (1976) claimed that the acquisition of communication skills entails a growing understanding of the pragmatic rules governing the use of language within a social context. Thus, our search for an assessment framework began with a definition of communication that concentrated primarily upon the pragmatics of language use, rather than aspects such as phonology, semantics or syntax, with emphasis placed upon the social functions of communication. We saw this as promising, in light of research suggesting that some children with language and learning deficits demonstrate problems with communication that are independent of their difficulties with the form or content of language, or which occur even when language skills appear relatively intact (e.g., Blank, Gessner, & Esposito, 1979; Snyder, 1978; Spekman, 1981). Ideas about the functions of a communicative act and its intentionality, context and conventionality were integral to theories of the development of communication explored by researchers such as Dore (1974), Bruner (1983), and Halliday (1975, 1978). For example, Dore extended the concept of the speech act to describe ‘primitive speech acts’ (p. 344) performed by children in the process of learning to communicate. He argued that these first utterances served a range of communicative functions, which included labelling, repeating, answering, requesting, calling, greeting and protesting. Similarly, Bruner’s (1983) examination of foundational language development stressed the importance of the social functions or communicative intent of language use. He maintained that the critical factor for judging a child’s progress in communication was not grammatical correctness but something closer to effectiveness or the capacity to ‘get things done’ (p. 18). Bruner asked: Can the child request, can he indicate, can he ingratiate or promise or support or show respect by the use of communicative means? And can he meet the conditions that the culture places on speakers who do these things?

28

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Indeed, Bruner (1983) described communication in terms of three broad capabilities, encompassing behaviour regulation (which could be broken down into acts such as requesting objects and actions or making a protest), establishment of joint attention (e.g., asking for information, making a comment), and social interaction (e.g., seeking attention, playing games). Similarly, Halliday (1975, p.  6) took a functional view of language acquisition, and argued that: [t]he child already has a linguistic system before he has any words or structures at all. He is capable of expressing a considerable range of meaning, meanings which at first seem difficult to pin down, because they do not translate easily into adult language, but which become quite transparent when interpreted functionally, in the light of the question ‘What has the child learnt to do by means of language?’

According to Halliday (1975, 1978), the communicative functions that a child can achieve develop and change with the child’s increasing mastery and include both linguistic and non-linguistic forms. He argued that, prior to the emergence of language in its conventional form, a child’s communication is predominantly instrumental, centred first upon generalised, and then more specific, requests for food or objects, and regulatory, in terms of controlling the actions of others and making requests for action or assistance. As the child’s competence increases, but still prior to the emergence of words or sentences in recognisable forms, the functions of communication develop in their complexity to include interactional (e.g., greeting a person, establishing shared reference) and personal (e.g., expression of feelings) aspects of capability, which in turn are built upon to include forms of communication that are heuristic (e.g., requests for information) and imaginative (e.g., pretend play). Finally, Halliday argued, the child adds informative functions or capabilities to his or her communicative repertoire. However, these differ from earlier communicative functions because they are used to convey information about things that are not visible in the immediate environment, and therefore must be carried out via some form of recognizable language. By contrast, all other emergent functions of communication can be achieved using natural gesture, facial expression or sounds. Thus, the framework we used to define foundational communication skills was based on a functional definition. It also drew on the work of Spekman and Roth (1982) and their emphasis on the importance of the social aspects of communication (e.g., turn-taking, topic initiation and maintenance) and ideas about audience (e.g., taking account of context and monitoring audience reception), and the practical application of these ideas by teachers and specialists working with students with disability (e.g., Downing, 2005; Franco et al., 2009). In particular, the functional capabilities of communication were of interest in terms of what a child needed to be able to learn and do, in order to become a competent communicator, rather than the means by which a child achieved his or her communicative ends. Table 3.1 lists the skills identified in this process. A functional definition of communication provided a base for decisions about the sorts of skills that might be included in the development of an assessment instrument. Review of these skills with panels of educators and speech therapists helped us to understand the skills that were prioritized as important for all students to learn,

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

29

Table 3.1  Example communication capabilities and indicative behaviours Capabilities Functional communication: The ability to achieve desired goals or ends through communication

Awareness of social conventions of communication

Form of communication

Indicative behaviours Requesting an object or activity Referring the attention of another Greeting or acknowledging a person Directing another person’s actions Giving personal information Responding to communication Following instructions or requests Refusing or rejecting an object, activity or instruction Responding to signs of emotion from others Repeating or retelling a message or story Responding to another person’s reference Attracting attention Taking turns in communication Adjusting distance from partner Staying on topic during communication Changing the topic of communication Matching style of communication to location Choosing topic to suit audience Using gestures, eye movements and facial expression to convey meaning. Using volume or intensity to convey meaning.

and thus met the measurement requirements of face or content validity. However, we also needed to be able to describe how well students could demonstrate these skills and recognize important transitions in their skill development. As Vygotsky (1929/1993) pointed out, progress in learning is a process of transformation or metamorphosis in the way a person demonstrates a skill. He illustrated this by explaining that, as children move from crawling to walking or from babble to speech, they transform their performance of a skill to something quite new. From that point on, adults around the child also change their expectations of the child and responsively adapt the way they encourage the child to practise and extend their newly mastered abilities. From an educational perspective, it is clear that responsive teaching takes into account a student’s current competence in order to provide tailored instruction and challenges. Bruner (1983) described these developmental transformations in communication in terms of modes of representation, from the enactive (based upon action within the immediate sensory environment) to the iconic (using concrete objects or images) to more abstract, symbolic forms. He envisaged a series of developmental phases ordered along a continuum, starting from an early, pre-intentional phase during which a child’s communicative intention must be inferred by caregivers. Similarly, Bates (1976) described this phase as perlocutionary, characterised by undifferentiated behaviours (e.g., crying, patting, waving arms, vocalising) which rely upon the uptake and interpretation of others for their communicative success. It is a developmental phase in which the child responds to the immediate sensory environment

30

K. Woods and P. Griffin

largely through the medium of attending to stimuli. As Bruner, Roy and Ratner (1982) suggested, a child’s actions during this phase are an early form of social transaction between the child and the caregiver, in which the child begins to learn to communicate because undifferentiated actions are responded to as though they were deliberately communicative. As a child’s communication skills develop, he or she becomes the active and intentional giver of signals, showing the first referentially interpretable indication of what is requested or needed (Bruner, 1983). Bates (1976) described this as an illocutionary phase of communication, marking the emergence of intentionality, in which a child uses gesture, eye movement, and facial expression for instrumental ends such as making requests and gaining assistance. It is a phase best characterised by the emergence of pointing, which, according to Bruner, may also coincide with the appearance of phonetically consistent, but non-standard, forms by which the child indicates objects or people. The next anticipated phase is the development of symbolic representation (whether spoken, signed, or using written or produced symbols), which accompanies or replaces the use of gesture to express communicative functions previously expressed by gesture alone. Bruner (1983) characterised this transition as the appearance in the child’s babbling of standard lexical labels, which are then responded to and interpreted as words or names by caregivers. From this point onwards, he argued, adults start to enforce ‘felicity conditions’ (p. 101) upon children’s attempts to communicate, which introduce them to the social rules and expectations that are embedded in the communicative exchanges of their culture. Development then proceeds in terms of increasing familiarity with, practice, generalisation, and adaptation of these social rules of communication. Design of an assessment of communication for students with additional learning needs thus began with consideration of theories of the development of communication and language skills. This understanding was checked with experienced special educators, including speech therapists and specialist teachers of students with both hearing and communication difficulties, at different points in the design process, and produced a hypothesised construct map (Wilson, 2005) to guide the next stage of assessment development and trial (see Fig. 3.1). The next task was to take each of the behaviours listed in Table 3.1 and work with panels of specialist educators and therapy staff to produce rubrics as the basis of an observational tool for teachers. This followed the processes described in Chap. 2, in which panel members attempted to define a behaviour in terms of its earliest manifestation and then the major transitions a child would go through as fluency or mastery was approached. The progression in Fig. 3.1 was used as a guide, but panel members were encouraged to draw on their experience working with students with a range of additional needs in language and communication skills to propose changes they watched for in their students and that would prompt them to introduce new activities and challenges. For example, a student who is learning how to greet another person may at first simply use facial expression, eye contact, vocalisation, and orientation or stillness to show their awareness of the person. The student’s communication is both responsive and intentional. With a growing capacity to use symbolic forms of communication, the student learns to use a particular name or

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

Students

High Competence

31

Items

Students who begin to take account of social conventions and contexts of communication.

Items showing understanding of audience and ability to adapt communication to suit different contexts.

Students who use conventional language forms for a range of communicative functions.

Items that demonstrate use of a recognisable vocabulary to perform a range of communicative functions

Students who use language-like forms for instrumental, personal, and interactional functions.

Items that require use of language-like forms to achieve basic social ends. Forms can be verbal or non-verbal.

Students who use rudimentary symbols to express their needs, wants and feelings.

Items characterised by use of symbols or gestures to achieve instrumental ends.

Students with an intentional and responsive style of communication.

Items that signal active intention to communicate (e.g., pointing, gesturing, smiling).

Students whose communication relies on adult interpretation of intent.

Items characterised by undifferentiated behaviours Low Competence

Fig. 3.1  Mapping hypothesised levels of communication competence

form of greeting to acknowledge a particular person. As understanding of social conventions develop, the student learns to adjust their acknowledgment of different people to take both context and their relationship to the other person into account. They are prompted to follow the cultural conventions of their community to greet others in socially appropriate ways.

3.3  Trials of the Communication Assessment After working with panels of teachers and therapy staff to develop rubrics for each of the communication behaviours shown in Table 3.1, the rubrics were assembled into an observation instrument for piloting and trial in schools. Each rubric was presented as a separate item in the survey, with levels of increasing competence of performance represented by item steps (quality criteria) for each item. An example is shown in Table 3.2.

32

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Table 3.2  Item 9 with its item-steps Item 9 Changing the topic of communication

Item steps 1. Withdraws attention if no longer interested in the topic of communication 2. Attempts to introduce a new topic of communication 3. Uses different strategies to change topic of communication, depending on relationship to communication partner and context

The trial engaged 674 teachers of 1646 students in 78 Victorian schools. At the time of the study, Victorian students with additional needs could be enrolled in either regular or specialist schools, some of which accepted only students with severe to moderate intellectual disability, physical disability, sensory disability or autism spectrum disorder. The schools that participated in the trial were drawn from each of these groups – 22 regular schools, 20 schools for students with severe to moderate intellectual disability, 14 schools for students with mild intellectual disability, 14 rural or remote schools for students with a range of disabilities, four schools for students with autism, three schools for students with physical and health-related disability, and one school that specialized in the education of students who were Deaf or hard of hearing. The students in the trial ranged in age from 3 to 18 years and over, with an average age of 11.5 years (SD = 4.1 years). Sixty six percent of the students were boys, and all of the students were described as having difficulties with communication skills. Item response modelling techniques for partial credit data (Masters, 1982) were used to check for both item and person fit. This allowed us to identify any items that did not conform to the expectation that more able students (i.e., those who demonstrated a higher level of competence across the full set of observation items) would be identified as capable of more sophisticated or challenging behaviours within each item in comparison to less able students. One item out of a set of 20 based on the skills listed in Table 3.1 showed evidence of misfit and was flagged for further review. It was referred to the consideration of 20 experienced teachers of students with additional needs from six schools and then, on their advice, rewritten to offer fewer response options. In its first trial, the item offered six response options from which teachers could select. This violated guidelines for writing rubrics suggested by Griffin and Gillis (2001), who noted that observers may find it difficult to discern differences in performance quality when options exceed five in number. Subsequent trials of the observation survey showed that this item conformed to fit expectations when the number of response options was reduced and skill difference between options was more clearly delineated. Person fit analysis helped us to check whether some students showed unexpected patterns of strengths and weaknesses across the set of skills, and to determine whether this might be due to factors such as careless responses from an individual teacher or, indeed, the nature of a student’s specific disabilities. The latter consideration was of particular relevance to ensure the fairness and accuracy of the assessment for students with a diversity of additional learning needs. For example, if person fit analyses showed that teachers of students with hearing difficulties

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

33

consistently demonstrated a different pattern of responses than teachers of students without hearing difficulties, then the report format for students with hearing difficulties would need to be specifically tailored. Some items might need to be removed from the observation survey when used for these students. However, person misfit was not detected for any subgroup of students based on disability type. In brief, the item and person separation reliability coefficients were 0.99 and 0.95 respectively which suggested that the communication items were spread well across a continuum of abilities and were able to separate students in terms of their proficiency (Wright & Stone, 1999). Cronbach’s alpha reliability was 0.96, indicating a high level of internal consistency among items.

3.4  Development of a Learning Progression Following calibration of observation items, a group of six special education practitioners interpreted a derived learning progression. The group comprised educators who had been identified by the Department as highly experienced and knowledgeable teachers of students with additional learning needs. Their task was to examine the hierarchical difficulty ordering of item responses derived from calibration and to decide on cut points that marked clear shifts or transitions in competence. Next, they worked as a group to define level descriptions for skills (item response options) that clustered together in terms of relative difficulty. Their judgements were compared to the hypothesised map developed in the design phase (see Table 3.3), and then used to develop an extended learning progression (see Appendix). Apart from a validity check, this step began the process of distinguishing the progression from the underpinning construct.

3.5  U  sing the Learning Progression to Set Instructional Goals Development of the observation survey helped teachers recognize and record their students’ communication skills, and thus answered the first question teachers had posed, but we needed to extend the research to help answer two other questions presented as ‘Where to next?’ and ‘How would an experienced special educator teach this student?’ The expectation was that teachers could use the derived levels of competence summarized in Table 3.3 (and presented as a learning progression in Appendix) as the basis for setting targeted goals for student learning. This section describes an investigation of the extent to which teachers could do this that was conducted in eight Victorian schools – two schools that specialized in teaching students with moderate to severe intellectual disability, two schools for students with mild intellectual disability, two rural schools for students with a range of diverse learning difficulties, one school for students with autism spectrum disorder,

34

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Table 3.3  Comparison between hypothesised and derived levels of competence Mapped levels Students are beginning to take account of social conventions and contexts of communication. Students use conventional language forms for a range of social and communicative functions. Students use rudimentary symbols to express their needs, wants and feelings. Students use language-like forms for functions that are instrumental, personal, and interactional. Students use rudimentary symbols to express their needs, wants and feelings. Students with an intentional and responsive style of communication. Students whose communication relies entirely on adult interpretation of intent.

Derived levels Students independently adapt, elaborate and adjust form and style of communication to suit requirements of a wide range of familiar and unfamiliar social contexts. Students take audience into account when choosing the topic, style or form of communication. They extend their understanding of social expectations of communication. Students use social rules of communication and modify their communication to suit the requirements of familiar contexts. Students may extend their vocabulary to include descriptive terms. Students recognise some basic social rules of communication and explore ways to convey information to others.

Students use symbols and words to express their basic needs, wants and feelings. Students actively and intentionally respond to communication from others by paying or withdrawing attention. Students may direct another person’s attention by pointing or vocalisation. Students are developing the ability to receive and respond to communication from others. Students may show acceptance or rejection of an object or activity by an emotional response and be learning to use gesture or vocalisation to make simple requests.

and a large regular primary school with high enrolments of students with additional learning needs. Teachers in these schools maintained records of individual learning plans for students and monitored learning across a 6 month period. They set some initial targets for students working at each level on the progressions and made records of their decisions. These records were then shared with researchers from the SWANS team when schools were visited to discuss teachers’ comments and observations. Teachers first used the observation survey to place their students on the learning progression and reported a very good match between their own expectations for students and reported levels derived from survey use. This may, in part, have been influenced by the collaborative approach to observation of students taken in the schools, including the use of moderation between teachers to confirm interpretations of student proficiency. Further, teachers commented on the ease with which they could interpret the learning progression and use it to support their understanding of students as learners. To demonstrate this, teachers reviewed their students’ levels on the learning progression and used this information to establish instructional goals. Some examples for each level on the progression are listed in Table 3.4. These goals represent only some of the objectives that were set for students at each competence level. They serve to illustrate the capacity of teachers to use information drawn from the progression to make decisions about the direction of teaching programs.

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

35

Table 3.4  Examples of learning targets linked to communication competence Communication competence Level Seven Students are learning to independently adapt, elaborate and adjust the form and style of their communication to suit the requirements of a wide range of familiar and unfamiliar social contexts.

Level Six Students are learning to take their audience into account when choosing the topic, style or form of communication. They are extending their understanding of social expectations of communication.

Level Five Students are learning to use social rules of communication and to modify their communication to suit the requirements of familiar contexts. Students may be extending their vocabulary to include descriptive terms.

Level Four Students are learning to recognise some basic social rules of communication and are exploring ways to convey information to others.

Level Three Students are learning to use symbols and words to express their basic needs, wants and feelings.

Targets for learning To speak with confidence in a variety of situations (e.g., contribute ideas during class and group discussion, share experiences and news, present reports). To elaborate on ideas and offer opinions. To provide reasons and background information to support opinions. To independently initiate and maintain a conversation with a peer, and to end a conversation appropriately. To ask appropriate questions of others during presentations. To incorporate rules of politeness into general conversations. To listen actively, using appropriate body language and eye contact during discussions. To moderate volume and tone when speaking indoors or to people who are standing close to the student. To ask and respond to questions when discussing personal experiences.. To contribute to class and group discussions by providing information about an event and the people involved. To take turns in a short conversation. To recount personal experiences in a logical sequence with the support of visual cues. To select an item or complete a message by pointing to the appropriate picture or representation of an item. To describe the emotions displayed by other people. To consistently make eye contact when speaking with others. To request items or respond to a familiar question using a multi-word or sign phrase. (continued)

36

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Table 3.4 (continued) Communication competence Level Two Students are learning to actively and intentionally respond to communication from others by paying or withdrawing attention. Students may be learning to direct another person’s attention by pointing or vocalization.

Level One Students are developing the ability to receive and respond to communication from others. Students may show acceptance or rejection of an object or activity by an emotional response and be learning to use gesture or vocalisation to make simple requests.

Targets for learning To copy the actions and sounds initiated by a partner. To recognise and choose between a range of photographs or simple symbols. To respond to a brief verbal prompt with a word, sign or pictograph. To respond with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to questions. To recognise and respond to a familiar routine and demonstrate basic contingency awareness. To recognise photographs and objects related to self. To recognise personal belongings and differentiate them from those of others. To show preference for particular people in response to verbal or physical prompting.

3.6  U  sing the Learning Progression to Identify Teaching Programs The next step in the research was designed to address the question ‘How would an experienced special educator teach students at different levels of competence?’ This question was approached in several ways, including visits to schools to discuss teaching practices, reviews of evidence-based practice published in peer-reviewed journals, and surveys to ask teachers about their use of instructional strategies. For example, to gather information on how best to support student learning of communication 36 schools were visited in which students, on average, had made strong gains in learning demonstrated by 2 years of teacher response to the observation surveys. Teachers were consulted about the sorts of programs and resources they used to support the learning of their students with additional needs and they provided access to their individual learning plans for students. Further, 23 experienced special education teachers from schools in which students had made above average positive gains in learning attended workshops to document the learning programs they recommended for students at each level along the learning progression. This information was summarised and assembled into an online survey format. Next, teachers in 68 schools (36 regular schools, 32 specialist schools) responded to the surveys for 713 students with additional learning needs. The students were aged from four to 18 years, and 64% were boys. All of the students had communication difficulties and were eligible for additional funded support from the Department on the basis of disability, with 92% also described as having difficulties in social and emotional skills, 39% as having a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, 26%

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

37

as having disabilities that impacted their mobility, 8% as blind or with low vision, 6% as Deaf or hard of hearing, and 4% described as having severe or chronic health conditions. Teachers were surveyed on their access to and frequency of use of teaching strategies, materials, and resources that had been identified, in earlier phases of the research, as effective for students working at different levels on the learning progression. This information was then summarized, reviewed by Department representatives and a panel of special education principals, school leaders and specialist teachers, and then provided to teachers as part of the reports generated by completion of an online version of the observation survey. A set of 12–15 recommended strategies was developed for each level on the progression. Some examples are shown in Table 3.5. The recommendations listed in Table 3.5 are examples of classroom strategies that experienced teachers drew upon to promote positive learning gains for their students with communication difficulties and that have been used here to demonstrate the way that teaching decisions were linked to a learning progression. Teachers reported that they drew on a wide range of strategies that they flexibly and responsively used to support their students’ communication skills. While some strategies were targeted to teach skills at particular levels, however, teachers also provided feedback about more generalized strategies they used for all students. These included emphasis on the importance of building positive, trusting relationships with students and their families/carers, using students’ interests and preferences to guide choice of materials, themes and media for learning activities, being sensitive to the age-relevance of materials, and working towards independence for students by starting with direct, explicit teaching and modelling of new skills, then gradually reducing the level of prompting and support provided over time. The programs of teaching described by experienced teachers who contributed to our research were rich, responsive to student interests and preferences, and delivered in a respectful and positive manner.

3.7  Summary This chapter describes the way that an extended group of people, including researchers, representatives of the Victorian Department of Education and Training, school leaders and teachers, and specialist therapy professionals worked together to develop an integrated program of support for teachers of students with additional needs. The example given in the chapter is the development of an observation survey and learning progression for functional communication skills, with explanations of the way decisions and interpretations were repeatedly presented to different stakeholder groups to check for utility and integration with education policy, teacher understanding, and the aspirations of students and their families. The chapters that follow describe a range of different studies that followed a similar pathway to develop learning progressions of literacy, numeracy, digital literacy, social and emotional understanding, movement, and thinking and learning skills for students with additional needs.

38

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Table 3.5  Examples of teaching strategies linked to communication competence Communication competence Level Seven Students are learning to independently adapt, elaborate and adjust the form and style of their communication to suit the requirements of a wide range of familiar and unfamiliar social contexts.

Recommended teaching strategies Provide opportunities for the student to participate in whole class and small group discussions, to present ideas and opinions to a group, and to listen to others present their ideas and opinions. Encourage use of memory aids (e.g., cue cards, props, PowerPoint slides, video footage) to structure presentation of information. Use authentic everyday activities of personal relevance for the student to practise conversation and discussion (e.g., cooking activities, sporting events, use of public transport, eating out). Provide structured opportunities for your student Level Six to practise communicating with new and Students are learning to take their audience into account when choosing the topic, style or unfamiliar people and in a wide range of form of communication. They are extending contexts. their understanding of social expectations of Explicitly teach the student safe and appropriate style and form of communication with people of communication. different levels of familiarity to the student. Use social scripts and role plays to prepare the student for new social situations and to allow the student to practise communication skills across a wide range of experiences and situations. Use games and activities that your student finds Level Five enjoyable, interesting, and personally relevant to Students are learning to use social rules of foster discussion, questioning and answering, communication and to modify their and waiting and turn-taking behaviours. communication to suit the requirements of familiar contexts. Students may be extending Use targeted questioning to extend the student’s their vocabulary to include descriptive terms. comments and observations. Use cue cards of the ‘wh’ questions (e.g., who, what, when, where) to prompt the student to provide background information and expand upon statements. Use focused listening activities (e.g., the student listens to another student tell a story, and then repeats the story). Incorporate social interactions into daily Level Four Students are learning to recognise some basic routines (e.g., teach and practise routines for greetings and farewells). social rules of communication and are Use targeted questioning to extend the student’s exploring ways to convey information to comments and observations. others. Play games to teach, practise, reward, and reinforce waiting and turn-taking skills, and to provide opportunities for the student to practise asking and responding to questions. Explicitly teach new vocabulary (e.g., use of adjectives, adverbs, substitution of words). (continued)

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

39

Table 3.5 (continued) Communication competence Level Three Students are learning to use symbols and words to express their basic needs, wants and feelings.

Level Two Students are learning to actively and intentionally respond to communication from others by paying or withdrawing attention. Students may be learning to direct another person’s attention by pointing or vocalization.

Level One Students are developing the ability to receive and respond to communication from others. Students may show acceptance or rejection of an object or activity by an emotional response and be learning to use gesture or vocalisation to make simple requests.

Recommended teaching strategies Use all interactions as opportunities to model the use of language, natural gesture, and facial expression in everyday communication. Build models for communication into everyday routines (e.g., establish greeting routines). Provide extended processing time for the student to respond to communication from others. Be patient, but expect a response from the student. Explicitly teach and model expected and appropriate ways for the student to make requests and gain the attention of others. Establish common sets of key words, signs, gestures, or picture symbols across all curriculum areas and programs to reduce confusion and frustration for your student. Develop this information in collaboration with family/carers to build a clear link between home and school. Use all interactions (e.g., greetings and farewells, play, mealtimes, personal care, transitions between activities, as well as teaching and learning activities) as opportunities to model the use of language, natural gesture, and facial expression in everyday communication. Maintain a student profile to be shared with all adults who interact with the student (e.g., listing the student’s likes, dislikes, and conditions that impact on the student’s ability to communicate, and strategies used to engage the student). Attribute meaning to the student’s vocalisations and gestures. Respond to any vocalisations, utterances, facial expressions, or gestures the student makes as though they are intentionally communicative. Use sensory activities to encourage interaction with others. Use sensory items (e.g., blow bubbles, play music, play with mirrors and torches) to engage the student’s interest and as a cue for attention.

In Victorian schools, the combination of the SWANs assessments, concurrent work on curriculum support for students working outside the established curriculum of the day, and training programs and field support for teachers was brought together as the Abilities Based Learning and Education Support (ABLES) resources. This is a suite of resources that the Victorian Department of Education and Training (the Department) has assembled to support instructional planning for students with disability. The genesis of this work is described in the preface to this book, and design principles that guided the development of the curriculum materials are described in Chap. 14.

40

K. Woods and P. Griffin

References Austin, J. L. (1980). How to do things with words. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bates, E. (1976). Pragmatics and sociolinguistics in child language. In D.  M. Morehead & A. E. Morehead (Eds.), Normal and deficient child language. Baltimore: University Park Press. Blank, M., Gessner, M., & Esposito, A. (1979). A language without communication: A case study. Journal of Child Language, 6, 329–352. Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk: Learning to use language. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Bruner, J., Roy, C., & Ratner, N. (1982). The beginnings of request. In K.  E. Nelson (Ed.), Children’s language (Vol. 3). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dore, J. (1974). A pragmatic description of early language development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 3(4), 343–350. Downing, J.  E. (2005). Teaching communication skills to students with severe disabilities. Baltimore: Brooks Publishing. Franco, J., Lang, R., O’Reilley, M., Chan, J., Sigafoos, J., & Rispoli, M. (2009). Functional analysis and treatment of inappropriate vocalizations using a speech-generating device for a child with autism. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disorders, 24(3), 146–155. Griffin, P., & Gillis, S. (2001). Competence and quality: Can we assess both? Paper presented to the British Education Research Association, Cardiff, Wales. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean. London: Edward Arnold Ltd. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London: University Park Press. Masters, G. (1982). A Rasch model for partial credit scoring. Psychometrika, 47, 149–174. Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (2007). What is language: Some preliminary remarks. In S. L. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Etica E Politica (pp. 173–202). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Snyder, L. S. (1978). Communicative and cognitive abilities and disabilities in the sensori-motor period. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 24, 161–180. Spekman, N. J. (1981). Dyadic verbal communication abilities of learning disabled and normally achieving fourth- and fifth-grade boys. Learning Disability Quarterly, 4, 139–151. Spekman, N. J., & Roth, F. P. (1982). An intervention framework for learning disabled students with communication disorder. Learning Disability Quarterly, 5(4), 429–437. Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA). (2019). Victorian Curriculum Foundation to 10, English. Retrieved 20 September 2019 from https://victoriancurriculum. vcaa.vic.edu.au/english/curriculum/f-10 Vygotsky, L. S. (1929/1993). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, Volume 2: The fundamentals of defectology (abnormal psychology and learning disabilities) (R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton, Trans.). New York: Plenum Press. Wilson, M. (2005). Constructing measures: An item response modeling approach. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wright, B. D., & Stone, M. H. (1999). Measurement essentials (2nd ed.). Wilmington, DW: Wide Range Inc. Kerry Woods  devoted 16  years to understanding how teachers observe their students and use formal and informal sources of assessment data to guide their classroom planning and teaching. Her doctoral research investigated the design and validation of criterion-referenced assessments of communication and literacy to support personalised learning for students with diverse additional needs. In collaboration with fellow academics and school and policy leaders, her research led to the development of an integrated program of advice and support for teachers of students with disability. She is currently an honorary Senior Fellow of the Assessment Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.

3  Functional Communication Competence for Students with Additional Needs

41

Patrick Griffin  held the Chair of Education (Assessment) at the University of Melbourne and was the founding director of the Assessment Research Centre. His work includes more than 40 years in teaching and research in educational measurement. He focuses on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for performance assessment, problem solving and higher order competency assessment and performance reporting. He was the measurement team leader for UNESCO in the SACMEQ project and a World Bank consultant in Vietnam, Philippines and China. He retired from University of Melbourne in 2015. He still leads several national and international studies of problem solving, literacy and numeracy and was the Executive Director of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project in which he pioneered the assessment of collaborative problem solving. His research on reliable rubrics is on display through the doctoral students’ work in this volume with special needs students.

Chapter 4

Using Symbols to Make Meaning: Functional Literacy for Students with Additional Needs Kerry Woods and Patrick Griffin

4.1  Designing the SWANs Literacy Assessment The first challenge for this research was to identify a way to define literacy that could help teachers recognize foundational skills in their students, including students with severe and complex additional learning needs. The focus was on describing things that students can do, rather than the things they struggle to do or do not do as well as other students. Further, the definition of literacy adopted for the research needed to be tailored to meet the instructional needs of students and to ensure that their skills could be recognized and monitored over time. The theoretical framework that underpinned design of the literacy observation survey thus drew on a wide body of research into the emergence of reading and writing proficiency, and acknowledged that the educational construct of literacy encompasses a complex and multi-faceted set of abilities. At the outset of the study, and in consultation with experts in the field of special education who formed the steering committee for the project, it was recognised that, due to the nature of their disabilities, some students might not learn to read or write in the conventional sense, but instead might develop alternative methods for sending, receiving, and organising information through the use of non-text symbols and pictures or a combination of these forms and conventional text. For example, at the time of the research, the use of picture exchange communication systems (see Frost & Bondy, 1994; Sulver-­ Azaroff, Hoffman, Horton, Bondy, & Frost, 2009) to support communication for non-verbal students was a widespread practice in Australian special education schools. Bruner’s (1966) theory of the development of symbolic representation was taken as a base upon which to build understanding of the emergence of literacy for students with additional needs. This forged a conceptual link between the development of K. Woods (*) · P. Griffin Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Griffin, K. Woods (eds.), Understanding Students with Additional Needs as Learners, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56596-1_4

43

44

K. Woods and P. Griffin

foundational communication skills (see Chap. 3) and the emergence of early literacy behaviours. In a similar vein, the seminal work of Chall (1983) on developmental transitions in learning to read commenced from a pre-reading stage of early proficiency in language and communication, while Clay (1991) argued that the beginning of literacy development is to be found in a child’s early experiences with language and the enjoyment and interest this entails (see also Burns, Griffin, & Snow, 1999; Hall & Moats, 1999). Building on this idea, Holdaway (1979) placed appreciation and enjoyment of language activities at the very outset of reading development as part of emergent literacy, a term introduced by Clay (1967) to describe the readinglike behaviour of young children before they begin to read in a conventional sense. From this point of view, emergent literacy marks a particular phase of development when children have not yet learned to identify words in text but have developed positive expectations about language-use, books, and activities that involve reading and writing or drawing. In the schema put forward by these researchers, a child’s later success in learning to read and write is built upon the development of positive expectations and motivation to participate in literacy activities (e.g., enjoying books and stories, showing curiosity about books and print), and foundational proficiency with the symbolic systems underpinning language and communication. In addition to aspects of emergent literacy related to language development and motivation or interest, Spear-Swerling and Sternberg (1996) described the earliest manifestation of learning to read as visual-cue recognition, while Frith (1985) used the term ‘logographic’ and Ehri (1992) referred to visual cue reading. Students whose reading is described in these terms typically use salient visual cues, such as shape or length, to recognise and read a set of very familiar words (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg). Then, as children develop their proficiency, they may begin to use some letter-sound relationships to predict or confirm their reading of a word, and next begin to rely upon both context clues and letter-sound relationships. For Spear-­ Swerling and Sternberg, this later stage was characterised as phonetic-cue word recognition when a student has mastered the alphabetic principle that letters represent sounds in systematic ways, can remember at least some letter-sound associations, and has developed a rudimentary phonological awareness. According to Frith (1985), reading at this stage is predominantly analytical, involving the sounding out of words. Similarly, Chall (1967) used the term ‘decoding’ to describe the essential elements of children’s reading behaviour at this stage of development. However, Coltheart and Prior (2007) argued that a distinction should be made between analytic phonics, in which a child learns the correspondence between letters and sounds, and synthetic phonics in which the emphasis is on blending sounds together to make words. They argued that these two skills are sometimes viewed as the same thing, when what may be needed is explicit teaching of each. In terms of the development of phonological knowledge, Adams (1990) described five underlying aspects of these skills, including the ability to hear rhymes and alliteration, perform oddity tasks (e.g., comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration), blend and split syllables, segment words phonemically (e.g., counting out the number of phonemes in a word), and perform phoneme manipulation tasks (e.g., adding or deleting a particular phoneme from a word and regenerating a word from the remainder).

4  Using Symbols to Make Meaning: Functional Literacy for Students with Additional…

45

A further developmental shift or phase, described by Chall (1967) as consolidation and the beginning of automaticity, has also been characterised as orthographic reading (Frith, 1985; Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1996) or cipher-sight word reading (Ehri, 1992), where readers begin to make use of all the letter information in a word rather than relying on partial cues. However, McCutchen and Berninger (1999) pointed to the importance of both phonological or phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in speech, independent of the spelling of those words) and orthographic awareness (knowing that written words are composed of letters just as spoken words are composed of phonemes). Similarly, Coltheart and Prior (2007) argued that skilled reading requires the use of two critical sub-skills: the application of letter-sound rules and rapid automatic recognition of familiar words. They suggested that some children who experience difficulties in learning to read find it hard to master the use of letter-sound rules, while others master letter-­ sound relationships and can sound out words, but fail to build up a sight vocabulary of words that are recognised automatically and without undue cognitive load. Clearly, then, the skills that a child must acquire in order to be described as a competent, or even functional, reader are complex and diverse. A similar observation can be made about the skills that underpin the emergence of early proficiency in writing. Indeed, analogous to reading, foundational writing skills could include components such as motivation to draw and write, proficiency with communication and language skills, knowledge of the conventions of print, understanding of the alphabetic principle, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge (Holdaway, 1979). McCutchen and Berninger (1999) described orthographic awareness as a combination of the skills of naming letters, writing letters from memory, and organising spelling units in words. Thus, orthographic knowledge refers to an understanding of the spelling patterns that are likely to occur in English, and its acquisition is a crucial aspect of later stages of development in both writing and reading (Spear-­ Swerling & Sternberg, 1996). Indeed, Coltheart and Prior (2007) argued that reading and spelling are symbiotic and, like Montessori (1912) so many years earlier, they proposed that the teaching of writing and spelling is an effective way to introduce children to the alphabetic principle and the rules of letter-sound relationships. Further, Gentry and Gillett’s (1993) developmental theory of spelling proposed the following stages of increasing proficiency: • Pre-communicative spelling, when the student knows that print carries a message, produces letter-like shapes, and may use some letters or approximations of letters, although letters are not yet linked to sounds. • Semi-phonetic spelling, when the student recognises that letters represent sounds and may represent words with single letters or clusters of letters. • Phonetic spelling, when the student chooses letters on the basis of sound rather than conventional spelling patterns and attempts to reproduce the sounds of words in invented spelling. • Transitional (to conventional) spelling, when the child begins to recognise and use conventional patterns of letters in attempts to spell words.

46

K. Woods and P. Griffin

In addition to shared components with reading, however, there are distinctive aspects of writing that include skills such as manual dexterity and control. For example, Oken-Wright (1998) and Jalongo (2003) suggested that drawing and other activities involving manipulation of materials serve as a scaffold for the development of writing and, from a similar perspective, Lamme (1979) described developmental stages in the manual production of writing as follows: • Production of pre-alphabetic and non-linear scribbles. • Acquisition of linearity and the use of repeated designs and letter-like forms. • Beginning of alphabetic writing using random strings or clusters of letters, numbers and shapes. • Use of invented spelling and the indiscriminate combination of upper and lower case forms of letters. • Consolidation of alphabetic writing and conventional or standard spelling. Yet, among students with additional learning needs, restrictions to mobility may mean that computers and other assistive technologies are used to enhance or replace skills requiring manual dexterity or physical control. Similarly, some students may use signing and picture symbols, rather than written words or drawings, as their means of sending messages or expressing meaning. Others may experience sensory disabilities that can be ameliorated, in part, by the use of augmentative technologies and teaching strategies that assist them to overcome these barriers to learning. A comprehensive measure of writing proficiency for students with learning difficulties thus needed to acknowledge alternative modes and methods of expression or demonstration of proficiency. Therefore, literacy was initially defined as the process of building and conveying meaning through written or produced symbols and text, and operationalised in terms of capabilities regarded as essential to an acknowledgment of its complexity. This process drew upon Bruner’s (1966) theory of the development of symbolic representation and a body of research into the emergence and development of reading and writing. It noted the importance of proficiency in communication and language for success in learning to read and write (Chall, 1983; Clay, 1991), and included aspects such as responsiveness to pictures and symbols, knowledge of the conventions of print, alphabetic and phonological awareness, and manual dexterity. The capabilities that were encompassed within the definition of the literacy were: • Awareness of symbols and print: Students develop understanding of the conventions of printed materials and symbolic modes of representation. This may include knowledge of how to manipulate a book or tablet, and expectations about the ways that books and written text work in different media. Students know that print carries a message and understand that written communication is presented in conventional form. They develop the ability to present information according to these conventions including, for example, the use of directionality in their presentation of writing or pictures. • Alphabetic knowledge: Students develop an awareness of letters. This includes the ability to differentiate letter forms, name letters, write letters from memory,

4  Using Symbols to Make Meaning: Functional Literacy for Students with Additional…

•

•

•

• •

47

and reorganise spelling units in words. They develop the insight that letters represent sounds in a systematic way. Sound-letter knowledge: Students demonstrate a growing ability to understand and manipulate sounds in speech. This includes the development of phonological knowledge and phonemic awareness through activities such as rhyming and sound matching. Forms of phonemic awareness include the ability to hear rhymes and alliteration, blend and split syllables, and manipulate phonemes by adding or deleting a phoneme to create a new word. Students’ attempts to spell unfamiliar words may draw on the surface sound features in spelling. Orthographic knowledge: Students develop the ability to dissociate written language from spoken language, and write in a manner that recognises not only what words sound like, but what they look like in conventional spelling. Their word recognition skills become increasingly accurate and make use of all the information in a word. Comprehension and fluency: Students develop the ability to use and recognise words, symbols or pictographs accurately and with relatively little effort. As fluency improves, students develop the ability to construct meaning from texts, and to demonstrate this ability through, for example, re-telling of stories or recounting of factual information. Control of means of production: Students develop the fine motor control to hold and manipulate writing and drawing implements and use a keyboard, and these skills develop in fluency and automaticity. Motivation: Students develop enjoyment of reading and willingness to initiate and practise reading and writing behaviours.

Items drafted to represent each of the capabilities are shown in Table 4.1, and a hypothesised construct map used to guide the development of rubrics is shown in Fig. 4.1.

4.2  Trial of the Literacy Items After several rounds of review with panels of teachers and literacy learning specialists to develop rubrics for each of the behaviours listed in Table 4.1, rubrics were assembled into an observation instrument for piloting and trial in schools. Each rubric was presented as a separate item in the survey with levels of increasing proficiency of performance represented by response steps or choices for each behaviour. An example is shown in Table 4.2. The trial of the literacy items was conducted at the same time as the trial of the communication items described in Chap. 3 (Woods, 2010). It engaged 674 teachers of 1646 students in 78 Victorian schools – 22 regular schools, 20 schools for students with severe to moderate intellectual disability, 14 schools for students with mild intellectual disability, 14 rural or remote schools for students with a range of disabilities, four schools for students with autism, three schools for students with

48

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Table 4.1  Example literacy capabilities and indicative behaviours Capabilities Awareness of symbols and print

Motivation to participate in literacy activities

Knowledge of letters and sound-letter relationships

Orthographic knowledge Comprehension

Control of production

Indicative behaviours Responding to symbols. Matching symbols and meaning. Ordering symbols to express ideas. Responding to photographs and pictures. Knowing how to handle reading materials. Recognising print has a consistent meaning. Using the terminology of printed text. Using punctuation in writing. Using basic grammar in writing. Participating in reading. Enjoying and relating to reading. Choosing books and stories. Showing interest in drawing or writing. Selecting materials for drawing or writing. Showing pride in drawing or writing. Identifying letters and numbers. Matching letters to sounds. Matching words on the basis of alliteration. Matching words on the basis of rhyme. Blending sounds in words. Segmenting sounds in words. Recognising word forms. Recognising parts of words. Predicting the meaning of words. Predicting the content of reading material. Re-telling stories. Producing letter forms. Copying words. Knowing how to present written material. Using pens/pencils for writing. Using computer keyboard and mouse for writing.

physical and health-related disability, and one school that specialized in the education of students who were Deaf or hard of hearing. The students in the trial ranged in age from 3 to 18 years and over, with an average age of 11.5 years (SD = 4.1 years). Sixty six percent of the students were boys, and all of the students were described as having difficulties with literacy skills. Following trial in schools, item response modelling for partial credit data (Masters, 1982) was used to check for both item and person fit. The Cronbach alpha reliability was 0.98, with item and person separation reliabilities of 0.99 and 0.98 respectively. Standard errors of measurement were acceptable for all items and, while most showed good fit to the Rasch (1980) model, four items showed some evidence of a degree of underfit and these were flagged for further review. These items had been written to capture students’ attitudes and motivation to take part in literacy activities. One possible explanation of the observed misfit was that these

4  Using Symbols to Make Meaning: Functional Literacy for Students with Additional…

Students

High Competence

49

Items

Students who have developed orthographic awareness, and whose reading shows automaticity and consolidation of understanding.

Items that require the ability to recognise and reproduce conventional spelling patterns and presentation of text.

Students who can analyze and manipulate sounds in words (e.g., use rules of alliteration and rhyming), and who have rudimentary knowledge of the rules and conventions of text presentation.

Items that require analysis of words into component sounds, and some awareness of basic rules of text presentation (e.g., use of capital letters, directionality of print).

Students who are aware that letters relate to sounds in systematic ways and use this knowledge to recognise or attempt to reproduce familiar words.

Items that require use of phonetic cues to recognise familiar words or demonstrate the use of phonetic information in attempts to write words.

Students who use visual cues to recognise and label symbols, including some letters, and identify some very familiar words.

Items characterised by use of visual cues to recognise letters and very familiar words, and attempts to reproduce letters, numbers and shapes.

Students who are beginning to show interest in pictures, shapes and sounds.

Items that demonstrate responsiveness to/interest in production of pictures, shapes and sounds (e.g., pre-alphabetic, non-linear scribbling).

Students who show responsiveness to objects within their immediate sensory environment.

Items characterised by responses to objects (e.g., books are explored as sensory objects). Low Competence

Fig. 4.1  Mapping hypothesised levels of literacy competence

50

K. Woods and P. Griffin

Table 4.2  Item 1 with its item-steps Item 1 Responding to photographs and pictures

Item steps 1. Responds to realistic photographs of familiar objects (e.g. by looking, touching, grasping or patting) 2. Identifies and names photographs and pictures (e.g., by saying or signing word) 3. Interprets ordered sequences of photographs and/or pictures to understand messages

items represented a different dimension of literacy. However, attitudes to literacy activities, and willingness or confidence to participate in them, had been identified during the process of rubric development as important aspects of learning for students with disability, some of whom seem to have the skills that permit their participation in reading and writing activities but lack motivation to do so. Following consultation with representatives of the Department and the project steering committee, a decision was taken to retain the items in the survey and to consider reporting attitudes to literacy as a separate factor. Where sub-domains of proficiency are highly correlated, however, a case can be made to report a single score, rather than or as well as a profile of scores, in the interest of teachers’ ease of use of the information derived from measurement (Wu, 2003). There was a strong positive relationship between students’ total scores across items that described attitudes to literacy activities and their scores on all other literacy items (r = .86, p