The terms formal and informal assessments are not used in IDEA. IDEA only talks about which types of evaluations need or do not need parental consent in special education (See 34 C.F.R. § 300.300). The ones that do are the ones that determine eligibility and the ones that don’t are the ones used for instructional purposes or given to all students– even if they are formal assessments.

But the terms still matter in special education to help parents and teachers understand the differences between the curriculum based assessments done for annual IEPs and in classrooms and the big tests done for evaluations and reevaluations.

Formal assessments refer to norm referenced tests. These are tests where students’ scores are compared the scores of other students of the same age, typically on a normal distribution. Rather than telling you about what content a student does or does not know, a normal referenced test will tell you whether a student is in the average range (90-110), in the high average range (111-100), in the low average range (80-89), or the low range (70-79) and so on.

Informal assessments are classroom and curriculum based assessments. They include classroom tests, summative assessments, formative assessments like having students rate how well they are doing, reading tests like the DRA, and all of the myriad assessment tools teachers use to understand how well a student is doing.

IDEA says that screenings for instructional purposes do not require parental consent. Curriculum based assessments given by special educators before annual IEPs fall into this bucket because they are being used to shape goals and instructional strategies for the student, not determine eligibility.

Parental consent is also not required before tests, like state tests, given to all students even if they are standardized tests (like the SAT that give scores on a curve). It is also not required if the team is looking at existing data, which is interpreted as including progress monitoring data.

Specifically, IDEA says in 34 C.F.R. § 300.302 that:

300.302 Screening for instructional purposes is not evaluation.

Formal assessments are a common part of qualifying process for special education and for related services. Some of the ones you might have seen are:

• IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet test
• Wechler test

For academic achievement, the three most common formal assessments are the Woodock-Johnson IV (WJ IV), the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement (KTEA), and the Weschler Individual Achievement Test 4 (WIAT-4). All three include sub-tests in reading, writing, and mathematics and provide standardized scores that tell you how a student’s performance on the test compares to the performance of other students the same age or in the same grade.

Many of the sub-tests on the three academic tests are similar to classroom assessments in content. For example, the WJ IV has a sub-test for word problems called the applied math subtest and another for decoding called the letter word recognition subtest. The difference is that the tests go all the way from PreK through end of high school (a way wider range than you use in a normal assessment!) and that instead of getting information on what a student knows and doesn’t know (can they read CVC words? Words with long vowels?) you instead get a scaled score.

Note that there are no specific formal assessments in special education for just one subject, like reading. Instead the tests used are batteries and students are assessed across reading, writing, and mathematics.

On your IEPs, you are likely to draw on many different informal assessments. These might include:

• Benchmark testing results
• State test scores
• Classroom test scores
• Work samples
• Results from an informal assessment packet (like in the IEP Success Kit sold here!)
• Writing samples
• Classroom observations including of how often a student raises their hand, calls out, gets out of their seat, leaves the classroom, turns in homework, puts their head down in class, and so on
• Insights from conversations with other teachers of the student

To be valid, norm referenced tests have to have been tested on similar students. For example, if your student is an English Language Learner, formal assessment scores are only relevant on them if the test was tested on other ELLs. Furthermore, norm referenced test scores are only valid if, among many other things they are in the child’s primary language.

If any of the many conditions for validity are not met then the formal assessment is invalid and cannot be used in a special education assessment. That is why districts will often have specially trained staff to administer Spanish language assessments or choose not to do formal assessments. If you have read any history of eugenics in the United States, you know how badly formal assessments can be abused– which is why there are so many rules.

The federal law for special education outlines specific rules that have to be followed for a norm referenced, or formal, assessment, to be valid. These are that the tests that, according to 34 C.F.R. § 300.304(c)(1):

(i) Are selected and administered so as not to be discriminatory on a racial or cultural basis;

(ii) Are provided and administered in the child’s native language or other mode of communication and in the form most likely to yield accurate information on what the child knows and can do academically, developmentally, and functionally, unless it is clearly not feasible to so provide or administer;

(iii) Are used for the purposes for which the assessments or measures are valid and reliable;

(iv) Are administered by trained and knowledgeable personnel; and

(v) Are administered in accordance with any instructions provided by the producer of the assessments.

The local educational agency shall provide notice to the parents of a child with a disability, in accordance with subsections (b)(3), (b)(4), and (c) of section 1415 of this title, that describes any evaluation procedures such agency proposes to conduct.

There is no formal measure of validity of an informal assessment. The goal is for you to form a holistic picture of the student’s baseline skills by drawing on as many data sources as possible. In research, we talk about the credibility of data. You need to make a credible case about a student’s performance by drawing on as many pieces of information as possible (which is called triangulation).

In many districts, special education teachers do no formal assessments. They are strictly done by school psychologists or other trained staff members. In many other districts, teachers are trained on and asked to do the Woodcock Johnson-IV or a similar academic norm referenced test. In those districts, teachers are responsible for administering the test, scoring it, and writing up a report on their results. Note that the WJ-IV and similar tests give teachers an automated “report” based on the student’s performance. This is gibberish and I highly recommend never giving it directly to parents. Instead, teachers can create their own template with explanations of the jargon and then copy and paste in the relevant sections from the automated report. 

Informal assessments are all you! I strongly recommend talking to, getting work samples from, and getting data from general education teachers who work with your student but ultimately, you are the one who does the informal assessments and, in most districts, writes the IEP that comes from them. 

Formal assessments are done for initial IEPs, triennial IEPs, an for interim IEPs if a student is being assessed for a related service. Special education teachers only do them for initial and triennial IEPs. For those, teachers are required to write a full annual IEP, which has the results of informal assessments, along with an academic assessment report which has the results of the formal assessments as well as, hopefully, the informal assessments that they did. [It is a pretty lousy report if it just has the mumbo jumbo that comes from the WJ-IV– parents want actual interpretable information as well]

You do informal assessments for annual, initial, and triennial IEPs. Even if there are formal assessments for those meetings, you still have to do the informal assessments because they are what you use to write the Present Levels of Performance (also known as PLOP or PLAAFP) and the goals.

It is really hard to emphasize how badly our country has bungled formal assessments in our history. We have administered invalid assessments in a discriminatory fashion and used their results to sterilize people, among other evils. As a result, the law is written to lay out clear guard rails around formal assessments. First, parents have to be informed of and consent to any formal assessment being done on their child. Second, the assessments have to be done properly. Third, parents can contest the results of formal assessments by not signing the IEP or by requesting their own assessments. 

These aren’t formal and so parents don’t have rights over the assessments. Classroom teachers do assessments every day whether through quizzes or checking students’ work– informal assessments are considered part of the daily functioning of schools and so are not covered by assessment plans. That said, parents can still dispute the IEP that comes from the assessments– they just don’t provide consent for the assessments.