The Promise of Meaningful Eligibility Determination: Functional Intervention-Based Multifactored Preschool Evaluation

Despite considerable controversy, standardized norm-referenced assessment procedures are widely used to determine eligibility for special education services. Under Public Law 105-17, children ages 3 through 9 may receive special services under the broad category of child with a disability—rather than traditional diagnostic labels—based on a delay in one or more developmental domains. Due to the limitations of traditional ability and developmental norm-referenced measures, the determination of developmental delays may be highly error prone and unrelated to intervention decisions. As an alternative, we describe minimal requirements for functional intervention-based assessment and suggest strategies for using these methods to analyze developmental delays and make special service eligibility decisions for preschool children (intervention-based multifactored evaluation or IBMFE). The IBMFE model provides a basis for deriving logical, natural, and meaningful discrepancies in behavior or performance through the contextual analysis of child-related, environmental, and instructional variables.