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Children with Disabilities

Introduction

There are many types of disabilities that affect children in very different ways. Development, learning processes and individual needs vary according to the nature of the disability. Children are differently affected by the extent, severity and multiplicity of the deficiencies. Assessing children with disabilities requires that aspects which differentiate each case be known and taken account of. It also requires that both resources and support from the surrounding environment be evaluated, since the child's chances of playing a full part in the community often depend on these factors.

In this entry we will refer to key aspects that should be taken into account when assessing children with disabilities. When we talk of children with disabilities we are referring to children with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation), hearing impairments including deafness, speech or language impairments, visual impairments including blindness, serious emotional disturbance, orthopaedic impairments, autism, traumatic brain injury, other health impairments or specific learning disabilities. Under the category of children with disabilities we currently include groups which were not previously included within this category, this being the case of autistic children and children with traumatic brain injury. In the past, children with these types of disabilities received isolated, specific, and different attention to other children. Without underestimating the need for such attention at certain stages of these children's development, today many of the problems that they have in common with other children of their own age are the ones to be assessed.

Many of the tests and assessment tools used to assess children with disabilities are frequently the same used with other children who have no disability. For this reason, this entry focuses on those aspects which are essential for the assessment of children with disabilities, without embracing other areas specifically related to the subject of assessment, dealt with in other entries of this encyclopedia.

The Evolution of Assessment Criteria

Assessment used in schools in the first half of the last century started out with and was characterized by the use of standardized tests which focused on general processes of intelligence, personality and achievement when faced with general tasks. Subsequently, in the 1970s, many specific standardized tests were developed, with great attention paid to students with learning disabilities. At the time, tests such as the Illinois Tests of Psycholinguistic Abilities (Kirk, McCarthy & Kirk, 1968) and the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (Frostig, Lefever & Whittlesey, 1966; Hammill, Pearson & Voress, 1993) acquired great importance. However, in the 1970s, standardized tests suffered from significant limitations with respect to generating useful information about the difficulties that students with deficiencies suffered from.

In the 1980s, schools started to propose alternative strategies to the standardized tests. Informal measures, mainly in curriculum-based measurement, acquired great relevance (Taylor, 1997). And the need to use both types of measurement was raised. While standardized tests are of greater use in diagnosis and the obtaining of general and preliminary information about an individual, informal measurement is of greater relevance when we require useful data for the education process because it concentrates on measuring the progress of the student in the curriculum.

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