How State Policies and Practices for Alternate Assessment Impact: Who Is Included in NAEP State Assessments.
• States have taken a variety of approaches in the development of their alternate assessments and the policies and procedures that support them. This has resulted not only in alternate assessments that differ from state to state in their characteristics, but also in variations in the characteristics and percentages of students who are targeted for participation in the alternate assessments from one state to the next.
UNDERSTANDING TEST‐TYPE ASSIGNMENT: WHY DO SPECIAL EDUCATORS MAKE UNEXPECTED TEST‐TYPE ASSIGNMENTS?
We interviewed special educators (a) whose students with disabilities (SWDs) were proficient on the 2008 general education assessment but were assigned to the 2009 alternate assessment based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS), and (b) whose students with mild disabilities took the 2008 alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) and then the 2009 AA-MAS. We explored teachers’ rationales for test-type assignment, student characteristics, and quality of instruction to determine the test-type decisions’ appropriateness. All teachers based their decisions on combinations of factors in the guidelines plus subjective and noninstructional factors. Findings raised concerns about the subjectivity of the assessment assignment system and the inappropriate grade-level instruction for SWDs. Future research, implications of these findings, and limitations are discussed.
The fragmentation of small asteroids in the atmosphere
The fragmentation of a small asteroid in the atmosphere greatly increases its cross-sections for aerodynamic braking and energy dissipation. The differential pressure across a meteoroid disperses its fragments at a velocity that increases with atmospheric density and impact velocity and decreases with meteoroid density. At a typical impact velocity of 22 km/s, the atmosphere absorbs more than half the kinetic energy of stony meteoroids with diameters, D M < 220 M AND IRON METEOROIDS WITH D M < 80 m. The corresponding diameter for comets with impact velocity 50 km/s is D M < 1600 m. Most of this energy dissipation occurs in a fraction of a scale height, which causes large meteoroids to appear to »explode« or »flare« at the end of their visible paths