Creating Writing Items of Graduated Complexity for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

• In Event: 66.037 - Writing for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities: It's More Than Just Writing Their Names

Abstract

The presentation objective is to describe the design strategies used to create exemplar constructed-response writing assessment tasks for SWSCD and the data sources NCSC used to refine them—special studies, range finding activities, and field testing. ECD and UDL were the theoretical design frameworks used to develop the tasks (Cameto & Haertel, 2013; Mislevy & Haertel, 2006); the online PADI application provided the methodological approach for the design. The significance of this work is that it pushes the boundaries of writing for SWSCD and resulted in tasks of graduated complexity that enable SWSCD to produce written products for assessment.
The constructed-response writing tasks are unique in that each addresses a set of grade-specific academic standards instead of a single standard. The constructed-response tasks are comprehensive, incorporating a broad set of skills to produce a written product, mirroring the more comprehensive standards found in the CCSS. The tasks are not intended to be administered in a single session but instead to be spread over multiple sessions depending on each student’s degree of engagement. Directions for administration include logical stopping places for test administrators to pause an item as needed.
In the elementary grades, students were to create literary text that included introducing a story/character, sequencing events, using temporal or concrete words/phrases, using actions/dialogue, including a conclusion, and demonstrating the conventions of standard English. Students in middle school grades were to create informational text that included introducing a topic, organizing ideas/information, using precise language/domain-specific vocabulary/transitional words/phrases, developing the topic, including a concluding statement, and demonstrating the conventions of standard English. High school students were to create persuasive informational text that included introducing the claim; creating an organizational structure; developing claims with evidence; using context to establish the significance of the claim; using words/phrases to clarify the relationship among claims, reasons, and evidence, including a concluding statement; and demonstrating the conventions of standard English.
To make the content accessible to a wide range of SWSCD, families of four items of graduated complexity were created for each constructed-response task (Haertel & Cameto, 2013). Each of the items addresses all the required grade-specific academic standards but with varying supports for students. Some supports were applied across all items:
• Prompt students to produce each part of their essay/story.
• Give students the option to read/hear their essay and make changes.
• Divide the writing into steps: draft/planning/final.
• Provide exemplar passages.
• Use response templates.
• Include reminders about capitalization/punctuation/complete sentences.
• Include illustrations to support comprehension/engagement.
Other supports varied in:
• How exemplar passages were presented (just at beginning, throughout item)
• Complexity of exemplar passages
• Degree to which items were broken down for students
• Degree of choice in content selection
• Use of sentence starters or strips
• Use of graphic organizers
• Provision of definitions
• Provision of word lists.
This work resulted in item families for seven grades founded in ECD and refined with data from empirical studies. The presentation will include a description of an exemplar task family highlighting the initial design features compared with the refined task family.

Author

• Renee Cameto, SRI International