Showcase: Online Professional Development for Improved Selection, Implementation, and Evaluation of Accommodations Sheryl Lazarus and Michael Moore National Center on Educational Outcomes University of Minnesota Nannette Pence Alabama State Department of Education Student Assessment Office

1. Introduction Sheryl Lazarus (National Center on Educational Outcomes) 2. State Overview Nannette Pence (Alabama Department of Education) 3. Accommodations Online Training Michael Moore (National Center on Educational Outcomes )

Multi-State GSEG Consortium Members 3 Alabama Tennessee Hawaii South Dakota Wisconsin

4 Each member of the consortium shares a common interest in investigating the characteristics of low performing students with disabilities, and each of the states is dedicated to building a solid foundation that seeks to improve both instruction and assessment for this group of students.

5 Persistently Low Performance Accommodations Practices (AL, SD, TN) Nature of Instruction Received (SD, TN, WI) Effects of Learning Progressions (HI)

The Alabama Focus Accommodation Practices: Recent studies have shown that the provision of accommodations is variable across students, classrooms, and schools depending on the accommodations, educational context, and a student’s demographic characteristics (Altman, et al., 2010). 6

The Alabama Focus Accommodation Practices: Finizio (2008) found that a student’s assessment accommodations more frequently mirror accommodations used for instruction in the past. However, Teachers often still are unclear on the definition and use of certain accommodations (Byrnes, 2008). 7

Accommodations: Results of a Survey of Alabama Special Education Teachers Between March and May of 2009, 2,336 special education teachers in the state of Alabama were surveyed about the factors and considerations affecting accommodation decisions for instruction and assessment. 8

The Training Features 5 Modules  Module 1 – Thinking about student characteristics  Module 2 – Linking student needs to accommodation decisions  Module 3 – Instructional Accommodations  Module 4 – Assessment Accommodations  Module 5 – Monitoring and Evaluation 9

Literature Review on Successful Professional Development NCEO sought to make sure our online training was developed with careful consideration for what the literature says about effective teacher professional development.

Literature Review on Successful Professional Development Findings included: 1.Effective teacher Professional Development must be connected to teacher’s context and practice. Case Based Instruction in the form of case studies that are written as rich narratives of real-life teacher practice, are sometimes more appealing to teachers than only content instruction.

Literature Review on Successful Professional Development 2.Effective teacher Professional Development should provide teachers an opportunity to APPLY what they have learned. For more, see NCEO’s Synthesis Report #84, Professional Development to Improve Accommodations Decisions -- A Review of the Literature nceo.info/OnlinePubs/Synthesis84/SynthesisReport84.pdf

The training can be found at To begin your free login account, go to The Alabama Online Accommodations Training

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NCEO YouTube Channel All the videos can be found on NCEO’s YouTube Channel: annel/UCnvPMaguIvwYqWrBS gZKlUA/videos

For more information: 16 NCEO - Sheryl Lazarus NCEO – Michael Moore ALSDE - Nannette Pence