Suchergebnisse

Several pieces of legislation, most recently No Child Left Behind, hinge on effective assessment of students with disabilities. Mandated inclusion and mandated accountability for progress raises many interesting questions regarding how to fairly, effectively, and validly perform assessments on students with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to summarize and discuss current research on extended time testing, particularly the implications of ETTA for assessment. Research indicates that in regard to students with learning disabilities practitioners and researchers need (a) to find ways to provide realistic, not inflated, estimates of a student's ability, (b) to determine if test instruments are suitable for use with students with learning disabilities, (c) to consider whether students with learning disabilities were included in the normative and validation samples, (d) to know that scores from accommodated assessments should be tentative, and (e) to weigh whether scores from assessments that are not validated are more useful than information available from other sources.

As networks have proliferated, questions have arisen regarding which structure is optimal. To obtain an answer from the hospital perspective, the authors conducted a survey of New York State hospitals to determine how network integration, complexity, and financial risk sharing relate to measures of financial performance during the period of 1991-1995. Of the 64 hospitals indicating a network affiliation by 1995, 67.2 percent listed some network risk-sharing activity. The least integrated networks were associated with the smallest improvements in throughput, and the most complex were associated with the largest negative changes in operating margins. During the first 2 years of network membership, hospitals joining risk-sharing networks experienced operating margin gains averaging 12 percentage points higher than hospitals joining networks without risk sharing; however, this difference dissipated in later years. Networks with higher levels of integration, lower levels of complexity, and which involve some risk-sharing between affiliates are most likely to experience improved hospital financial performance during the network's initial years.