The role of tests in assessing intellectual functioning of children with special needs

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of tests to assess intellectual functioning of children with specific disabilities commonly referred to today as children with special needs. Such disabilities include mental retardation, orthopedic and muscular impairments, chronic medical disorders, emotional disturbance, visual impairment, hearing and speech difficulties, and neurological dysfunction. These children, along with those having socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds different from the test standardization population, are vulnerable to inappropriate administration and interpretation of standardized tests. Testing usually has led to labeling and classification, with the ensuing course of events determining whether the child's disability becomes a handicap, socially defined. The entire direction of a child's life may change as educational, social, vocational, and other opportunities are shaped-and often restrictedaccordingly. Feuerstein and Bersoff have noted that psychometric testing may create as much as reflect inequality when it deprives a child of educational and other life experiences that develop the knowledge, skills, and values required to mesh with the mainstream of society.1 Hobbs elucidated the far-reaching consequences of classification in The Futures of Children and stressed that classification should emphasize services required, not types of children.2 In 1975, individual programming for every child with special needs was mandated under Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children's Act. Increasingly, tests contribute more to individual program planning than to categorizing. But many users of test data who make important decisions about children's lives, in schools and elsewhere, still view test scores as definitive data.