Sustainable development goal 4 of providing learners with inclusive and equitable quality education requires us to measure how learners are progressing towards learning. Over the past decades, we’ve made great progress in measuring early grade learning outcomes with regional school-based assessment tools, national and household-based assessments and national-level exams. Unfortunately, progress on including learners with disabilities in assessments has been mixed.
So, what can we do to make assessments more inclusive?
1. Include people with disabilities more proactively and equitably in assessment design and implementation.
Including and empowering organizations of persons with disabilities to design and administer assessments in partnership with in-country and international assessment experts and government assessment officials is an important step. This collaboration can help ensure people with disabilities are centered in the process, reduce stigmas about them and foster advocacy and sustainability for inclusive education. Having people with disabilities serve as assessors also strengthens in-country capacity and can even improve assessment administration.
2. Assessment design must incorporate principles of universal design.
Using universal design in learning assessments means making assessments usable by all people without the need for adaptation or specialization. Teachers have already begun to use these principles in their teaching practices through Universal Design for Learning. Universal Design for Assessment (UDA) guides us to design assessments that are more equitably accessible to all learners right from the start rather than adapting existing assessments. Although UDA is not yet widely used in international education, it has recently been piloted for the Early Grade Math Assessment in Central Asia.
3. Make classroom-based formative assessments more inclusive.
We should strengthen teachers’ skills in designing and using flexible formative assessments to highlight learners’ progress and gaps. Empowering teachers to use universal and flexible classroom instruction and to apply those techniques to their classroom assessments gives them more agency and the ability to adapt to the needs of their learners. Data collected on learners’ skills should be used to inform and improve their educational experiences.
4. Invest funding into making assessments more inclusive.
We must continue to do research on how best to design assessments so that they allow learners with disabilities the best chance to demonstrate what they know. This work must be prioritized to make meaningful progress on inclusive assessments, even when it requires extra funding and extra time.
