Welcome to your home for alternate assessment tools & resources
NAAC is a five-year project funded under the United States Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). NAAC has  four primary objectives: to bring together and build on high quality, technicallly sound alternate assessments; to demonstrate high quality design through our selected partner states; to administer all types of alternate assessments; and finally, to provide technical assistances through high quality dissemination practices.

Resources for Parents & Teachers

Resources for Parents

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Resources for Teachers

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Presentations & Publications

Presentations

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Publications

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Tools for Alternate
Assessment

National Alternate Assessment Center’s (NAAC) Student/Program Observation Tools
These tools allow for the examination of an individual student’s (particularly a student with significant cognitive disabilities) range of instructional targets, supports, and practices that allow appropriate access to the general curriculum. These tools may be used to improve classroom instruction for students with significant cognitive disabilities. The on-line training will provide participants with instruction on the use of the tools and provide an opportunity to practice using video training clips and related materials. [Click here to read more...]
Validity General Supervision Enhancement Grant (GSEG) Consortium
Alternate assessment is moving more firmly into a standards-based accountability world, due in large part to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA (Quenemoen, Rigney, and Thurlow, 2002). [Click here to read more...]
Learner Characteristics Inventory (LCI)
The Learner Characteristics Inventory (LCI) (Kearns, Kleinert, Kleinert, and Towles-Reeves, 2006) was developed by the National Alternate Assessment Center (NAAC) in order to investigate the true learning characteristics of students participating in alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS). The instrument was intended to verify validity questions that extend our knowledge of the assessment population to insure that 1) the test is designed for the intended population; and 2) the intended population is participating in the test (Kearns, 2006). The AERA, APA, and NCME Joint Standards on Psychological Testing (1999) recommend that “population(s) for which the test is appropriate should be clearly delimited” (p.17). The students who participate in AA-AAS represent a highly diverse population with varying levels of communication and other complex characteristics that impinge on the assessment design and the interpretations that we want to make about the assessment results. The LCI is designed to enhance the demographic data collection for the test and when used appropriately, provide additional data to consider in the validity evaluation for AA-AAS. The LCI should not be used as an assessment device or in any other capacity where decisions would be made about students based on the results. [Click here to read more...]

NAAC functions in collaboration with National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO)University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC)CAST, University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne (UIUC), National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA). For more information, please contact us.