Testing SEND and EAL students

Assessing students with coordination difficulties

Students with co-ordination difficulties may experience problems in using a mouse. In some cases, an adapted mouse device may need to be used when assessing disabled students. However, slowness or difficulty in using the mouse should not make any significant difference to a student’s performance on LASS. Thus, even if a student is totally inexperienced with using a mouse and is consequently very slow, the LASS scores will still be a valid measure of their performance.

Please see the User Manual in the Downloads section for more information.

Assessing students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Students with ADHD are liable to experience difficulty with many types of assessment (not just computerised assessment) because of inattention and impulsiveness in responding. In cases of students with ADHD, teachers should therefore be prepared to take such factors into consideration when interpreting the results of LASS tests. On the other hand, LASS tests are typically found to be more stimulating than conventional tests, so students with ADHD will generally remain engaged and attentive for longer than might be expected. To maintain engagement and interest, however, and ensure that results are as reliable as possible, it is recommended that only one test per session should be administered to students with ADHD.

Please see the User Manual in the Downloads section for further guidance.

LASS 11-15 is less problematic than many conventional methods of assessment when it comes to assessing students with limited proficiency in spoken English, due to its strongly visual format and minimal reliance on spoken instructions. The practice items enable most students, even those with very little English, to understand the task, and where there is uncertainty a teacher or assistant who speaks the student’s first language can help with explaining instructions.

Case studies of two students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) are given in the Case studies section of the User Manual, available in the Downloads section. Like most students with limited English, these students responded well to the assessment and extremely valuable information was obtained.

It may be found that EAL students gain low scores on some of the LASS 11-15 subtests (particularly those assessing literacy skills), which reflects their lack of experience with English. However, on the memory and reasoning subtests in LASS, scores will normally reflect their true abilities because these are largely unaffected by language factors (provided the student is comfortable with the digits 1-9 in spoken and written form in order to attempt Mobile phone).