Posted in Eleanor Cawley, M.S., OT

Annual Review will be here before you know it–Create Balanced Assessments!

Posted on by Eleanor Cawley

That’s right!  Annual review season will be here in just a few months.  You should start writing your annual reviews shortly.  During annual review, it is prudent to get a student’s feedback on what is working and what is not working.  Make sure that you have a way to gain that additional information.  An interview is always helpful to provide insight on a student’s ability to function not only in the classroom but also at home.  Parents so often paint a different picture of a student’s abilities at home.  Students can behave differently at home.

This is the time to put all your ‘ducks in a row.’  When assessing your students, make sure to have a balanced assessment with some type of real-life [authentic] assessment.  This often means having a rubric to demonstrate how a student’s progress has been judged and the data that supports the student’s progress.

Think about interviewing your student to learn about his or her insights into their skills. Did you ever think about providing your student with a satisfaction survey?  This is quite eye opening.  By developing a rapport with your students, you have the opportunity to create a report that is quite inclusive of all their skills and their opinions.  Listening to and including your student’s opinions leads to better goal development, better outcomes and improved compliance with recommended strategies.

Engage your students in every way possible to participate in collecting data and the development of their IEP.  You will go a long way in developing the respect and the trust of your students.

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Author:

I am an occupational therapist with 18 years of experience in the pediatric sector, much of that time as an independent contractor. I am very passionate about my work and my writing. My degrees include a Bachelor’s of Science in Health Sciences and a Master’s of Science in Occupational Therapy from Touro College. Since graduating as a non-traditional student, I have worked in a variety of settings throughout the life span but settled in the area of school-based therapy. My interests lie in the area of using technology to support independence and I often train students to use programming not only to monitor their own goal progress but also support educational, vocational and life skills. Another area of particular interest is documentation. As an independent contractor for many years, I feel that it is important to align methods of documenting goal progress with educators for greater consistency and understanding when writing for an IEP. It is better to plan a format for documentation used in the IEP, such as for assessment and goal progress and that a rubric, in many ways, fulfills the need for consistency in documentation across all domains. Combining my interest in technology and documentation, I use Microsoft OneNote to maintain all documentation. I create a digital notebook for each student or patient with any forms required uploaded as templates which can then be completed, and saved automatically. I strongly believe in student centered approach to therapy. Students must be active participants in developing goals and documenting progress. In order to help students understand their progress, I teach my students to develop electronic portfolios and to use spreadsheet programming with graphs to collect data and view progress, whenever possible.