The Context and Future of Judgment-Based Assessment

This paper places the present focus on judgment-based assessment (JBA) in early childhood special education in theoretical context and explores some of the directions that future research and practice might take. Three directions are emphasized: (a) the need to widen the content of JBA to include not only judgments of abilities but also emotional characteristics and developmental processes; (b) the value of moving beyond adult perceptions to include judgments by other informants, such as peers and, most importantly, persons with disabilities; and (c) the possibilities for developing new methods for eliciting judgments, such as response to videotaped segments of the child’s behavior and content analyses of spontaneous vocalizations collected longitudinally.