Promising approaches to generating inclusive data for children with disabilities: the role of learning assessment tools

Wed, March 13, 4:45 to 6:15pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Gardenia A+B

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Recent estimates indicate that 240 million children in the world have some form of disability (1), and that an unacceptable proportion of them are excluded from accessing, progressing in and benefiting from education.(1),(2),(3)Multiple barriers undermine the learning trajectories of children with disabilities, including stigma, lack of trained teachers, inaccessible school facilities, and inadequate learning materials and assessments. Importantly, children with disabilities tend to be under-identified, misrepresented, or even excluded altogether, from nearly every metric relevant for policy making, program design and evaluation, including education statistics (4) and learning assessments (5). Failure to include children with disabilities in mainstream monitoring and evaluation efforts, including routine learning assessments, makes them more likely to be overlooked in program design, policy planning and in emergency preparedness, mitigation and response.

Promoting early development and learning opportunities for all children requires strengthening monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems to generate inclusive data to:
Identifying the number of children with disabilities;
Documenting the experiences of children with disabilities in their learning environments;
Tracking the progress and achievement of key learning outcomes through inclusive learning assessments.

To achieve this, the capacity of M&E systems must be strengthened on the use of data collection instruments and protocols that allow for the disaggregation of key indicators according to disability status and developing and implementing accommodation strategies to ensure that children with disabilities can participate learning assessments.

This panel brings together a group of experts working towards making early learning and development assessments inclusive of children with disabilities. It gathers diverse results from original research studies carried out across different contexts, highlighting promising practices, challenges, and the opportunities ahead in terms of generating more and better evidence for children with disabilities.

The first presentation describes the lessons learned from using IDELA to assess young children with functional difficulties in Kenya. Drawing on a sample of 1,615 preschoolers aged 2 to 9 years, including 248 children identified has having a functional difficulty on the basis of the UNICEF/Washington Group Child Functioning Module, the study finds that patterns of missing/skipped responses and measurement reliability are similar for data collected from children with and without functional difficulties. Based on the results, the authors conclude that by using reasonable accommodations, IDELA can be completed with most children with functional difficulties across different functioning domains, without the need of substantive adaptations. The presentation shares some of the challenges in the project, including how to document variations in the administration process and highlights the need for further studies to clarify when, and how, IDELA scores and data analyses should be adjusted to account for modifications of the standard administration protocol.

The second presentation discusses challenges that remain in accessing tools to measure foundational learning outcomes for children with disabilities, despite the stronger support for and adoption of policies for inclusive education. The authors share the experience of adapting the IDELA assessment tool for children with disabilities in Rwanda and Papua New Guinea, highlighting the importance of allowing enough time for assessment and the need for dedicated training to prepare enumerators to conduct assessments for children with disabilities, tailoring the administration to specific functional difficulties through accommodations or adaptations of the assessment protocol.

The third presentation addresses the challenges to providing quality education for young children in Yemen, and the usefulness of disaggregating program results for children with and without disabilities. The authors describe the experience of Gateway to Education Project which was implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, sub-national education offices, and local associations to support numeracy and literacy skills through special remedial classes for struggling children including children with disabilities. The study systematically assessed the level of all children’s learning and performance, using the standard contextualized Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) numeracy and reading tool, and the Washington Group Short-Set of Questions was used to identify students’ disabilities and functional difficulties. Program results for children with and without disabilities, along the benefits of remedial classes will be discussed.

The last presentation describes recent methodological work on the IDELA toolkit to foster the collection of accurate and inclusive data on children with disabilities. Drawing on recent data collected from a global online survey with current IDELA users across more than 30 countries the authors will document current practices around the use of the IDELA child assessment tool with children with disabilities, highlighting reported challenges and promising practices to make the tool inclusive of children with difficulties in different functional domains. Results from piloting a new module for the IDELA Classroom Environment tool to measure school and classroom inclusiveness will also be presented, along concrete recommendations to increase the availability of inclusive, high-quality data on early childhood development and learning using the IDELA tools.

The panel concludes with a discussion around the areas of opportunity to promote the inclusiveness of learning assessments and data, and the role of NGOs and OPDs to ensure that data and evidence are translated into actionable insights that help fulfilling the education rights of children with disabilities.