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The administration of special education assessment has greatly evolved in the United States

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The administration of special education assessment has greatly evolved in the United States. However, some aspects of special education instructions have changed very little in the past years. According to Swanson (2008), over the past years in the history of American education, students with disabilities have been receiving instructions in school settings identical to those of other students. This has exposed disabled students to conditions similar to those of other students. As a result, the same assessment method was used for both the disabled and able students. The assessment results portrayed a great inequality in the performance of the disabled students compared to that of other students.

The majority of schools realized the incomparable trend revealed by the performances of the disabled students and that of normal students. As a result, they decided not to involve the disabled students in state assessments. Although this was an unfair practice, they felt that it was essential since the disabled students would not meet the required standards of the tests when allowed to take them. This resulted in several problems in schools with cases of disabled students. According to Quenemoen (2008), the problems included an increase in the rate of referrals to special education, the need to exclude the students from the curriculum, and lack of information on education results of the disabled students. The practice was therefore poor and discriminative since they resulted in low-quality education among disabled students.

In the early times, there were no clear indications of what students should know at the end of an instruction. This is because the instruction techniques and curriculums used during this period were topic-centered. The topic centered assessment tests the ability of the students to master course content instead of testing their ability to understand the concepts addressed by a topic and its applicability. As a result, teachers mainly focused on covering the content of a curriculum without minding whether the students understood it or not.