Throughout the collaborative assessment process, team members who represent various disciplines, focus on making a determination about why a student has a specific performance problem and how that performance can be improved. During assessment, team members engage the student in designated activities, using a variety of teaching and intervention strategies to elicit optimal performance. Using the ecological inventory as the guide for assessment, team members record whether the student performed designated activities independently, how the student participated, and what type of assistance elicited optimal performance. When multiple team members participate in an assessment, it is helpful to designate roles. The facilitator engages students in routine activities, eliciting both typical and optimal performance.
Observers watch and suggest alternative strategies to the facilitator.
A complete assessment usually takes several sessions, and in the course of the assessment, each team member would alternate among the roles of the facilitator, observer, and recorder. Once student performance is assessed in natural environments, the next step of collaborative assessment is to analyze performance discrepancies and generate hypotheses about performance difficulties. Discrepancies are identified between the way in which designated activities are performed by the student and the way in which they are performed by a person without disabilities. It is essential that the team members identify and discuss the basis for their interpretations. The first purpose of the diagnostic assessment is to answer the questions raised during hypotheses generation, using a variety of informal and formal strategies.