2.5 Background Information, Record Keeping, and Collaborative Assessment

The Domain Review and the Review of Existing Data

Evaluation begins with a decision about what to evaluate, and Illinois formalizes that decision. Before testing, the team — including the parent — conducts a domain review and documents which areas will be assessed, by whom, and with what instruments.

The Eight Illinois Evaluation Domains

23 Ill. Adm. Code 226.75 defines "domain" as an aspect of a child's functioning that must be considered when designing an evaluation, and lists eight:

A domain may be answered from existing information rather than new testing, but it may never be skipped. "No concern noted" is a documented conclusion; leaving a domain blank is a compliance error.

Review of Existing Evaluation Data (34 CFR 300.305)

As part of any initial evaluation or reevaluation, the team must first review data already available: prior evaluations, parent-provided information, current classroom assessments and teacher observations, screening results, MTSS intervention data and progress-monitoring graphs, state assessment results, attendance, discipline history, and any outside reports the family shares. Only then does the team identify what additional data, if any, are needed. This requirement exists to prevent both over-testing and the collection of data no one will use, and on a reevaluation it can support a decision that no further testing is necessary — a decision the parent must be notified of and may contest.

Vision and Hearing Come First

Interpreting a cognitive or academic profile before ruling out sensory loss is one of the most consequential errors in evaluation. Fluctuating conductive hearing loss from chronic middle ear infection presents as inattention, inconsistent following of directions, and articulation errors. Uncorrected refractive error presents as reading avoidance, place-losing, and headaches. Both patterns are routinely misread as ADHD or as a learning disability. Illinois lists vision and hearing as mandatory domains for exactly this reason, and current screening results should be in hand before other results are interpreted.

Gathering History, Keeping Records, and Collaborating

The Structured History

Objective 0003 requires candidates to apply knowledge of procedures for gathering background information on a student's academic, linguistic, family, medical, and developmental history. The history is a data source with three specific jobs: it establishes onset (an intellectual disability requires onset during the developmental period; autism is generally evident before age three), it supplies the evidence to rule out exclusionary factors (attendance, instructional history, language exposure), and it prevents misattribution of an environmental effect to an internal cause.

A usable history covers:

• Developmental: pregnancy and birth history, milestone attainment with approximate ages, any loss of previously acquired skills
• Medical: diagnoses, medications and dosing schedule, hearing and vision history including ear infections, injuries, sleep
• Linguistic: languages spoken by whom and in what settings, age of first English exposure, literacy in the home language
• Educational: schools attended, gaps or interruptions in schooling, attendance, retention, prior interventions and their intensity and duration, prior evaluations
• Family and cultural: routines, priorities, what the student does independently at home, family concerns and beliefs about the difficulty

Interviewing Well

Open-ended, non-leading questions produce better data than checklists. "Tell me about mornings at your house" yields more than "Does he have trouble getting ready?" Ask for specific recent examples with dates rather than global judgments. Ask the same question of more than one informant — parent, general education teacher, previous teacher, and the student — because informant disagreement is itself diagnostic information about setting specificity. Use a qualified interpreter when needed and never a sibling or another student.

Creating and Maintaining Accurate Records

Records built during evaluation drive later decisions, and inaccurate records propagate. Practical standards:

• Record data, not conclusions. "Read 42 words correct per minute with 6 errors on a grade-3 passage, 9/12/2026" is usable; "reads poorly" is not.
• Date and source every entry, and distinguish direct observation from report.
• Keep score reports, protocols, and raw data organized so that a future team can replicate the interpretation.
• Store records in accordance with the Illinois School Student Records Act and FERPA, and share only with staff who have a legitimate educational interest.

Collaborating and Making Referrals to Specialists

Evaluation is a team activity: the school psychologist, speech-language pathologist, occupational and physical therapists, social worker, nurse, general education teacher, and family each hold a different slice of the picture. Coordinate scheduling so that a single student is not pulled from instruction eight separate times, and hold a pre-meeting to reconcile conflicting findings before the parent hears them contradicted at the eligibility conference.

Refer outward when the question exceeds the team's scope: audiology for a suspected hearing loss, ophthalmology or a teacher of the visually impaired for functional vision, a physician for a suspected medical cause, an assistive technology specialist for complex AAC, or a bilingual evaluator when no team member speaks the student's language. Two boundaries matter. A district may not require a family to obtain a private medical diagnosis as a precondition for evaluation or services; if a medical assessment is needed to complete the evaluation, it is the district's cost. And a referral outward never pauses the 60-school-day clock — the timeline runs from written parental consent regardless of an outside provider's schedule.