Rating Performance Assessments of Students with Disabilities

In this article, the authors looked for evidence of bias and changes in inter-rater reliability when raters were aware of a given student's disability. Teachers were provided with a set of both mathematics and language arts performance assessments and their accompanying rubrics. The teachers rated the papers once and then a second time, days later, only this time they were made aware of students with disabilities. There were an extremely large number of papers which eliminated the chance that the papers would have been remembered from their first rating. These were their findings: 

Strengths

• Performance assessments, when applied to students with known disabilities, show no evidence of systematic bias, where ratings are consistently lower or higher than for those students in the general population. (Mastergeorge, 2009)

Weaknesses

• Teachers demonstrate poorer inter-rater reliability when assessing students with known disabilities (Mastergeorge, 2009).
• While teachers perceive themselves as being objective and unbiased in their use of performance assessments, they describe a perception that not all of their colleagues are as “fair” as they should be. (Mastergeorge, 2009).

Based on this article, one may conclude that use performance assessments does not promote a general bias toward higher or lower marks for students with disabilities. It does, however, behoove educators to consider their own perceptions of students with disabilities and the accommodations that may be necessary for their success.

Mastergeorge, A.M. and Martinez, J.F. (2009). Rating Performance Assessments of Students With Disabilities: A Study of Reliability and Bias. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment (28): 536-550.