Now that you and your student are well and duly registered, you need to make the decisions that will guide the remainder of the process. It's time to choose appropriate indicators from the Extended Standards. This may seem like a daunting task, but the Dept. of Ed. and CETE have worked together to streamline the process.

The Kansas Extended Standards are located at ____. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the Extended Standards for the available subject areas: Reading, Math, Science for 2009-10. The Extended Standards contain information regarding the Alternate Assessment, a list of the General Standards, a list of the Extended (Alternate) Standards and indicators (benchmarks), and a correlation of the two types of standards based on grade level. Clarifying examples are available as a separate document HERE. You need to be familiar with this information, but before you spend hours immersed in this bit of literature, read on...

CETE has made our job easier! Rather than spending tremendous amounts of time sorting through the masses of information located in the Extended Standards documents to locate appropriate indicators for our students, we can now easily and quickly access this information through the CETE website!!

This year ALL indicators are available to ALL students because of the revisions. The restrictions will return next year. As was the case last year, if a student scored a 4 or 5 on an indicator in the previous testing year, that indicator may not be used in the current year's assessment. In addition, at least one indicator from each Extended Standard must be chosen (Science is the one exception). On top of this, no more than one Extended Indicator may be chosen for any General Standard. Confusing? You bet. Complicated? Unbelievably. Frustrating and time consuming? Absolutely. But no more! Now, on the CETE website, under your student's name, is located only the indicators for which that student is eligible, both by grade level and by previous year's scores. You simply review this list of indicators and make your selections accordingly. In addition, the indicators are grouped according to General Standard, rather than numerical order, so you can easily confirm that you are choosing only one indicator per standard. And to put the icing on the cake (or the bow on the present or whatever other cliche you wish to use), if you make a mistake a big pink box explaining the error appears on the screen. Beautiful! 

So, you have a list of indicators. Which ones should you choose? This is a highly individualized decision  but here are a few pointers I find useful:

1. The indicators/skills selected should match up with the student's curriculum as much as possible. This creates less work for you as you can simply incorporate both instruction and assessment into your daily routines and activities and avoid the need to come up with separate or "special" activities just for assessment purposes.
2. It is helpful to incorporate the chosen indicators into the student's IEP goals and benchmarks. This is not strictly necessary, however, and sometimes not feasible; in my  case, it helps me ensure we spend enough time on the skills in question.
3. The indicators/skills chosen should  be reasonably challenging to the student, not necessarily something they can perform as a matter of course. For instance, choosing "assigns meaning to olfactory cues" is probably not appropriate for a student who can read basic sight words and simple stories and is doing basic math.
4. Indicators often repeat across subject areas. For example, "understands cause and effect" can be found in all five areas. You can decrease the amount of data you have to take by choosing these repeated indicators. However, remember that if the student scores a 4 or 5 on those indicators, they cannot be used the next year. It can be a wise strategy to "save" those repeat indicators for subsequent assessments, especially if you have students for whom it is difficult to find appropriate indicators. NOTE: When choosing this strategy it is essential that the activities chosen for a particular indicator clearly match up with the subject area. This needs to be extremely transparent so there may be times when you cannot use the same activity to demonstrate skills. Example: matching for math, matching for reading.
5. Another trick is to recognize when indicators are assessing essentially the same skill. For instance, "matching" and "sorting" entail similar skill sets. The student who is sorting is also matching items to like items. Therefore, you can use the same activity to assess both indicators.
6. When you have multiple students taking the same alternate assessment, it is helpful to assess them on the same indicators. As an example, last year both Science and Social Studies contained the indicator, "participates in activities to help the environment." I selected this indicator for all my students, who were at different grade levels, and we did a class project related to helping the environment.

Indicators chosen, it's now time to enter them on the CETE website. Locate your student's name for each test in the Student section (students are listed alphabetically by building). To modify the indicators:

• Click on the number located in the "Indicators" column (this number indicates the number of indicators already entered for that student)
• Select the "Modify Indicators" button
• Click in the radio buttons that correspond to your chosen indicators
• When finished, click on the "Save Indicators" button
• To return to the Student page, click on "Back to student list" located under that page title

Once you have this completed, make sure to transfer the assessment information to the student's IEP. According to Mr. Buster, you can make changes to indicators without needing to use a change form. However, if you change test formats (such as going from Modified to Alternate), you will need a change form or an IEP meeting. Remember that IEPs are locked 10 days after the meeting so it may not be possible to do these adjustments without an amendment.