Rationale for KTEA Case Report and Presentation to School Based Team

 

This is a case report and presentation I gave to my classmates as the final project for Educ 622, Psychoeducational Assessment. I believe it is an excellent artifact to include in the practice section of my portfolio because it demonstrates not only my ability to conduct a level B assessment, but to analyze and present the results of such an assessment to a School-Based Team. As an Inclusive Education Facilitator, it is not a requirement of my job to conduct such assessments, but as a Learning Support Teacher and a case manager, it is very helpful to be able to administer, understand and relay the results of such assessments. As a member of a School Based Team, I think it will be very helpful for me to be able to offer to take a bit of the load off some of my colleagues, as the wait list of students who need to have a KTEA administered in order to qualify for a referral for a level C psycho-educational assessment is quite long. In addition, as a classroom teacher, I have found it invaluable to be able to familiar with the nuances, ethical implications and practical limitations of level B assessments such as the KTEA. I chose to learn how to assess and interpret the KTEA-3 in particular because this is the assessment most commonly used in my school district.

 

In practice, many of my colleagues discuss and use the results of KTEAs in ways that were not recommended by my instructor. For example, the KTEA-3 is an American assessment that is not normed based on Canadian students, let alone First Nations students or French Immersion students. It is very important to keep this in mind when interpreting and presenting results of the KTEA, as many of the students I work with are not likely to have the same English language competency as American students for whom academic English is their only or primary dialect or those who have been in English language instruction for their entire academic experience. A strength of the report as an artifact is that I make this point explicit, whereas in the presentation, I only stated it orally. I both cases, however, I did share the information that we need to take “Colin’s” results with a grain of salt because his nationality, ethnicity and early educational experience are not represented in the normed standards for the KTEA-3. According to Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, “When a test developed and normed for one group is applied to other groups, score interpretations should be qualified and presented as hypotheses rather than conclusions” (AERA, APA, NCME & JCSEPT, 2014, p.139). As a practical example, he had no idea what the Imperial system measurements were and did not recognize the U.S. coins pictured in some of the math questions.  

 

This artifact will be very useful to me in the future as well, as I can use both the report and the presentation format as a template for when I need to document and report KTEA results to parents or other stakeholders. For example, the sections which describe the task for each subtest on the presentation will give a lay person an understanding of what the student is asked to do, while not giving away any of the test questions. This is an essential skill and can be challenging to write. If this is not done with care, a practitioner may violate their legal and ethical responsibility as a test user to keep the test content secure. My presentation avoids this problem, and it will continue to help me do so in the future – the descriptions I use will not destroy the validity of the test for other learners who otherwise might learn about what is on the test if specific questions are discussed in detail with parents or teachers.    

 

References

​

American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, & Joint

Committee on Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (U.S.). (2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, D.C.: AERA Publications.