What Every Must Know Special Educator - Council for Exceptional ...

standards (for moderate/severe) should be included.
The CEC Standards Flowchart (Appendix 3) can be of
assistance in determining the appropriate knowledge
and skill sets.
Address the Entire Content Standard
Most of the CEC standards are complex with multiple
components. All of these components for each of the
Standards should be included in the assessment plan.
For example, CEC Standard 8: Assessment requires the
teacher candidate to understand assessment (legalities,
theory, and practice), conduct both formal and informal
assessments, and monitor progress of students as
part of the standard. Thus, the assessment system developed
by your program needs to document mastery
of the multiple components within the CEC Standard.
CEC made this relatively easy for you by bolding key
words in the descriptions of the standards.
Align Assessments with CEC Content Standards
Providing an alignment matrix for the components
of the assessment and the CEC standards will allow
the reviewer to assess the relationship between the
assessment and the standards more easily. This alignment
can then be transferred to the scoring guide for
documentation of mastery of the standards.
Develop scoring guides for each assessment
Scoring guides must be sufficiently complete to allow
the reviewer to understand what standards are being
met by what component of an assessment. Aligning
the CEC standards to your scoring guide again provides
the reader with a quick analysis of the standards,
criteria for mastery, and candidate performance. Many
programs use rubrics for the majority of their scoring
guides to facilitate consistency across grading and
expectations of candidate performance.
Develop a Common Rubric Format
If the faculty chooses to use rubrics, the rubric formats
should be consistent across assessments with the rating
scale, the format, and wording. Choose a rating
scale and descriptors that all graders/raters are willing
to use. Do you want a three-, four-, or five-point
scale? What are rating descriptors, e.g., unacceptable,
acceptable, target or not met, met, exceeds? The key is
to use a consistent format, including the direction of
your number scale (left to right or right to left), for all
rubrics to ease comparison and program review.
284 whAt every SpeCiAl eduCAtor muSt Know
Strategies for the Program Review
Report
Be consistent in your presentation of the assessments,
scoring guides, and data. For each assessment, the report
should provide the description of the assessment,
alignment of CEC standards with the assessment, and
findings/analysis of the data. Attachments for each
assessment will be the directions to the candidate
(actual assignment), scoring guide/rubric, and data.
Following the same format and sequence for each
assessment will allow for an accurate and efficient
review.
Presenting Data
The report must provide data to document that program
candidates are meeting the standards, and/or
that changes have been made to the program based
upon performance data from the candidates. It is
important to provide the data in aggregated format,
for each semester or year that the class is taught, for
different locations if applicable and for different program
groups if possible. The “N” should be provided
(number of candidates included), with the number and
percentage of candidates per rubric title, or categories
(unacceptable, acceptable, target). You could also
report this as the number of candidates who earned
the rating. The assessment items should be clearly
documented, along with the semester and year the
data was collected.
Findings
As the faculty collects the data, they should analyze the
data to identify areas for improvement in the program.
The faculty also documents when no improvements
are identified based on the data. This continuous
improvement analysis must be described in Section V
(Use of Assessment Results to Improve the Program)
of the program report.
Connecting CEC Program Review and
NCATE Unit Review
NCATE unit Standards and Accreditation
NCATE accreditation is based on the unit conceptual
framework and six standards. The unit’s conceptual
framework describes the shared vision that guides efforts
to prepare candidates to work in P-12 schools. It
is the compass for making unit level decisions and the