[rharris]

Has anyone adapted IDELA (long or short form) to accommodate children with disabilities?

Topic

[Filipa de Castro]

Save the Children is committed to ensure that children with disabilities can demonstrate their learning and development on an equal basis to their peers.

While IDELA includes some adaptation guidelines for inclusivity , these are not comprehensive for all tasks or the range of functional difficulties faced by children with disabilities. Recognizing this gap, Save the Children invested in new technical work to make the IDELA toolkit more inclusive, ensuring children with disabilities can equitably demonstrate their abilities. In particular, the new technical work aimed to:
• Systematically incorporate UDL principles to make IDELA accessible to more children without extensive adaptations.
• Provide clear accommodations or adaptations by type and severity of functional difficulties, ensuring equitable participation.
• Offer guidance on scoring to reflect children’s true potential when accommodations are applied or unavailable.

In early 2024, Save the Children partnered with Catholic Relief Services to pilot the new inclusive protocol for the IDELA child assessment. The pilot revealed that the protocol is feasible and allows to include a larger and more diverse group of children. If you would like more information about the revised protocol of IDELA with accommodations for children with disabilities, send us a message!

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