FTCE Guidance and Counseling PK-12: Basics of Student Assessment

Importance of Assessment
Assessment of both the student and the situation in any counseling sessions is very important, in that it serves to provide the counselor with both treatment and methodology for that treatment. A counselor will consider each student's developmental stage and environment to determine the best method for approaching a particular circumstance or problem. In addition, school or district policy can affect the counselor's methods, as for instance whether to use formal methods or to be more informal and flexible in developing a treatment for a particular student. Assessment can be formal or informal, and can be rather individualized among counselors. A comprehensive assessment of student needs, the precipitating event or situation, and a careful choice of approaches and actions based on this assessment are very important factors in the success of a counseling relationship.

Distinguishing Characteristics of Effective Assessment Methods in Academic Setting
In contrast to the assessment methods used in a mental health institution, assessment in an academic setting is less formal and more geared toward establishing a trusting and collaborative relationship with the student. In a mental health setting, the counseling session might be well served if the counselor asks direct questions to the client, in order to assess the problems. However, in an academic setting, an effective counseling relationship depends not only on the student's cooperation, which is facilitated by a less direct approach to assessment, but also on the incorporation of student needs not readily divulged. A counselor in an academic setting needs to be aware of, for instance, a student's body language when assessing and treating the student. It is important for a counselor in an academic setting to listen and observe carefully, and to engage in non-intrusive inquiry.

Information Obtained During Assessment
Although a counselor may discover information over a period of time and through different methods, in the context of the counseling relationship he or she should strive to obtain the following information:
Precipitating situation or event: specifically the duration, intensity, manifestation, and triggers
Developmental and environmental factors: for instance, socioeconomic and cultural settings, medical and emotional background, physical and emotional development, etc. This information can often be obtained from parents, teachers, and other people connected to the student.
Relationship specifics: specifically relationships with family, classmates, and teachers, and how the student behaves in these relationships
Academic performance:  what are the student's successes and failures in school?  Does the student have difficulty in particular subjects?
Does the student have an identified learning disability?
Personal attributes and affinities: favorite activities, favorite subjects, talents, and strengths, and how these are incorporated in the student's daily life

Informal Assessment
Informal assessment can occur in the classroom setting, in conversation with the student, or by observation. Although informal assessment does not lend itself to a standardized rubric, such activities as games or storytelling can provide a holistic profile of a student. Other strategies for informal assessment include role-playing, opportunities for decision-making, writing exercises, and prioritized lists. These activities can reveal a student's thought patterns and coping strategies, including those areas which a counselor identifies with specific treatment. Informal assessment can be particularly beneficial when working with an early or middle childhood student who may not be able to isolate and articulate difficulties. Counselors conducting informal assessment need to report their findings in a more comprehensive and less quantitative format than that of formal assessment.

Formal Assessment
Formal assessment is conducted with standardized instruments and can be beneficial in identifying specific areas and treatments for intervention. Formal assessment operates within a rubric, or set of rubrics, that incorporate behavior checklists, measurements of self-perception, value scales, and inventories of skills and interests. This type of assessment also provides the counselor with identification factors that are more targeted and specific than those of informal assessment. Formal assessment, because of its rubric-driven reporting, can sometimes provide counselors with a more objective evaluation of a student than would be gained from informal assessment. Counselors should be aware of, and trained in, an array of formal assessment methods. Results from a formal assessment may include data relating to significant behaviors or attributes that could be overlooked and therefore not addressed in an informal assessment.

RIASEC
John Holland observed that different people have different orientations and preferences to tasks and that certain tasks are associated more strongly with certain occupations. If you can ascertain the person's task preferences (or interests) and match them to a vocation, there is a better chance that person will find career satisfaction. Holland and others used traits to create vocational inventories (e.g., the self-directed search [SDS] and the Strong Interest Inventory [SII]) that could predict the type of work a person might be drawn to and succeed at. RIASEC (realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, conventional) is the acronym that stands for the personality types that fit into particular occupational categories—they are often called the Holland Codes. The theory is that by obtaining one's codes, one can identify careers of interest that fit into the interest of the person. After deriving a code from an inventory, students can use software programs or resources like the Dictionary of Occupational Titles or the Occupational Outlook Handbook to explore interesting careers they might not have been aware of before.

Participating in Development and Implementation of Student Service Plans
School counselors may be present from the beginning of a service plan, as when the parent of a new student states an already-identified need and asks for help or when a teacher sees the student struggling and consults with the counselor to find out why. The school counselor is in the unique position of being able to help at every stage of the process, from identifying a problem, arranging needs assessments and interpreting outcomes, and consulting with other professionals (such as psychologists, psychiatrists, speech pathologists, etc.) to making sure the student's academic schedule is modified to the best possible fit. The school counselor can check in regularly with the student, teacher, or other direct-service providers, track progress, and collaborate with others to provide counseling and other learning services.
The school counselor stays in touch with the parents as well and may act as mediator if problems arise in service teams. Along the way, the counselor can provide the student with individual-based advocacy, support, and encouragement.

Strong Interest Inventory, MMPI, WAISC-II, and Beck Depression Inventory
The assessments listed are measuring different aspects of a person's makeup—they're used for different purposes. The Strong Interest
Inventory is a career inventory, usually administered to students in high school, that gives the taker an idea of his/her inclinations in the vocational arena. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is usually given to people for whom there is a suspicion of personality problems that run deeper than the average neuroses: a student who shows signs of psychopathology, such as schizophrenia, may take the MMPI before school personnel begin to investigate a possible diagnosis of serious mental illness.
The WAISC-II is an IQ test that many students will take at some point in their education. The results may tell those who interpret it at which level a student should be placed in academic coursework. IQ tests can also help reframe behavioral problems: a student may be acting out because the material is too difficult or out of boredom if the student's intellect is not being sufficiently challenged. The Beck Depression Inventory would not normally be administered to a student unless there is some concern that the student is suffering from depression.

Achievement Tests and Intelligence Tests
Intelligence tests provide a score for an individual student, and because intelligence is considered a stable quality, it rarely changes significantly across a lifetime. The student is primarily affected by IQ scores, which can determine whether he/she may be placed in an ordinary classroom, in special needs education, or in a gifted program. Because IQ is seen as fairly immutable, there is no particular attempt to increase IQ by way of additional coursework or special programs. The person affected by IQ assessment results is the test taker: no one is held accountable for a student's IQ score.
Achievement tests, also called high-stakes tests affect more than the individual test taker, although they also have an enormous effect on a student's career. The Stanford Achievement Test and the ACT determine whether a student will graduate high school, go to college, and which college will accept him/her. But achievement tests are also used to evaluate teacher performance and overall school ratings (hence the high stakes). The aggregate of students' achievement test scores can affect the funding or teacher allocation—the life or death of the entire school.

Interpretation of IQ Tests
IQ tests are formal, norm-referenced assessments that help educators understand where a student's academic intelligence falls on a continuum. IQ scores help establish students' correct placement in academic courses and can help identify whether there are unusual circumstances
(developmental disability, learning-related neurological problems, or giftedness) that require different types of learning support. IQ tests are standardized, with a mean (average) score of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The standard deviation is the average amount of error (hence, deviation) around the mean of a given population.
Because the tests are standardized, a student's derived IQ score is associated with a percentile: it can be plotted on a normal curve, using the standard deviation to determine where the score falls in comparison to the norm. It's possible to state with high confidence that a score of 130, for example, is two standard deviations above normal and places the student in the upper 95% of IQ scores. A score of 85 is an indicator of low IQ or borderline intellectual disability—far enough below normal to warrant special attention from the educational team.

Causation and Correlation
In scientific assessments, many different statistical factors may be related to an issue in question, usually indicating a correlation.
Correlations between factors do not indicate which is an independent versus dependent variable, and often, correlations can be coincidental with no relation. There are often more than two factors to consider, which leads to other issues in identifying the cause. Statistical analysis can demonstrate only correlation strengths between two variables, but causation comes down to inference and logic. For instance, there is a correlation between ice cream melting when it is hot outside because hot days and ice cream melting coincide. The correlation is very strong in this example; however, causation is not indicated by statistical overlap alone. In the same way, school counselors should be wary of assuming the causation of an effect in a student's life and instead look at the problem from multiple directions before implementing a solution.

Reliability

Test Conditions
Reliability is a measure of how often a particular score will be derived under the same conditions. Another word for reliability is consistency. The importance of conditions can't be overestimated. If you measure the height of a tree using a digital laser tape measure, assuming you use it correctly, you'll get the same height every time.
If you climb the tree and measure it with a shoelace, chances are you'll get different numbers each time. If you have three glasses of wine, climb the tree, and measure it with your thumb, chances are you'll fall off before you get halfway up the tree—and if you do manage the climb, your numbers will be wildly inaccurate.
Reliability uses deviations in measurement to ask, 'If we gave this test again under the same conditions, would the same test taker get the same score, and if not, how different would that score be?' A highly reliable test will give a very similar score under the same conditions.

Reliability in Assessment
The Stanford-Binet, the WAIS, and the WISC have been in use for many years, been given millions of times, and been revalidated many times over the years. Recent studies on the WAIS-IV show test-retest reliability scores of .70 to .90 on tests repeated between 2 and 12 weeks. (Test-retest reliability is reported on a scale of 0 to 1.0. A score of 1.0 would mean that the person taking the test would get the same score every single time.)
Internal consistency reliability measures whether items that purport to measure a construct actually do so. Items supposedly measuring the same thing are measured in terms of how highly they correlate with each other. In this measure of reliability, researchers aren't looking for extremely high scores (such as a Cronbach's alpha of .95+), indicating item redundancy. Low correlation between items (such as α<.30) indicate that items are actually measuring different constructs—and have poor reliability.
Inter-scorer reliability determines how closely two scorers would grade the same essay, for example: obviously, if one scorer gives an essay 95% and another scorer gives it 30%, there is low inter-scorer reliability. The scoring system itself must also be reliable.

Validity
Validity asks, 'Is this test measuring what it claims to measure?' Early IQ tests, for example, often measured whether a student was male or female, rich or poor, or black or white: wealthy, white male students invariably got higher IQ scores than other students. With rising consciousness of diversity, tests were reformulated, with items and subtests measured for construct validity. Some cultural biases will always exist (the expectation that we can measure intelligence with a written exam is one such bias), but with time, more and more test-taker diversity is included in the more valid tests.
Content validity determines whether individual items actually measure the construct. If, for example, an IQ test item actually measures preference for the color blue, and we know that liking blue isn't related to one's intelligence, that item diminishes the content validity of the test.
Criterion and concurrent validity measures whether the measure (test) is highly correlated with other measures of the same construct.
For example, does a high IQ test score predict academic success (criterion), and does it correlate highly with the score of the same student on another IQ test (concurrent)?

Ethical Requirements Related to Administration of Assessments
Confidentiality is an important consideration for the administration of assessments of groups and of individuals. In administering a group test, students will naturally know who took the test, but in cases in which an individual student is taking an assessment, it is preferable to plan the test taking to be as private as possible, so the student doesn't feel singled out and other students don't notice. Confidentiality of scores and interpretations is a vital part of protecting students as well.
Ethical guidelines remind counselors not to overstep the scope of their competence: if one has not been trained in the administration and/or interpretation of a particular assessment, a more experienced professional should be chosen.
Choosing well-constructed assessments is an ethical responsibility as well: school counselors should investigate assessments in terms of their cultural, economic, or gender biases before assuming the assessments fairly measure students from diverse backgrounds.

Nonacademic Formal and Informal Assessments
Assessments should never be given in the absence of a reason. If a child is having trouble that seems to be related to poor academic performance or is clearly personal, assessments may be used before deciding on interventions to try to determine where the problem lies. Students who are bullying or being bullied or who are showing signs of stress, depression, anxiety, or substance abuse may be candidates for formal and informal assessments covering nonacademic life factors. Some formal assessments of personality, emotional, and behavioral conditions may include the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Lazarus's BASIC ID, and Cameron and Turtle-Song's SOAP notes.
Components of the BASIC ID assessment help the counselor see the client holistically through the following categories: behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal relationships, drugs and diet. SOAP notes are organized to help with case conceptualization:
Subjective observation—client reports and school counselor's observations
Objective observation—client orientation, physical appearance, and behaviors in face-to-face sessions
Assessment—a general idea of the client's current thinking, feeling, and social interactions
Plan—treatment plans, including possible referrals

IQ Scores of Children Considered for Special Needs Education, Regular Classrooms, or Gifted Child Programs
IQ scores below 85 are one standard deviation below the norm. Although no one would recommend basing a move to a special needs program on one IQ test score, a score below 85 would ring alarm bells and indicate a need for further investigation. A score between 85 and 100 might make a school counselor pay attention to whether the student has physical, intellectual, emotional, or social needs that aren't being met or is experiencing life stressors that are seriously affecting the ability to concentrate or retain information. The 'normal' IQ range is between 100 and 115, and students with scores over 115 may be considered for inclusion in gifted programs. Students who experience behavioral problems but obtain high IQ scores may need to be moved to more challenging coursework, or to life situations that ask more of them, to prevent boredom and burnout. But whatever a student's IQ score, school personnel should keep in mind that IQ tests don't necessarily measure emotional intelligence or other forms of intelligence beyond the traditional language and math skills. Extremely bright students may lack vital intelligences in terms of communication, social skills, or empathy that less 'intelligent' students may have.