Renee Cameto

Renée Cameto, Ph.D., principal scientist in SRI International’s Center for Education and Human Services, is a recognized expert in alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) and has a thorough understanding of the status, characteristics, and implementation of these assessments nationally and of critical design components that contribute to valid assessments.

Cameto has designed, developed and piloted assessment tasks for students with significant cognitive disabilities using evidence-centered design (ECD) frameworks integrating principles of universal design for learning (UDL). With funding from two Enhanced Assessment Grants (EAGs), she has developed suites of tasks with graduated complexity for assessment in mathematics and English language arts that are aligned at grade-level to the Common Core State Standards. She has authored two series of technical reports on the approach and results of pilot tests.

Acknowledging her teams’ expertise in ECD and UDL, she and her team were selected to design the summative assessment tasks for the U.S. Department of Education (ED), Race to the Top-funded National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC) GSEG consortium. Cameto was an invited presenter on ECD and UDL at the Technology Enhanced Assessment Invitational Symposium held in Washington, DC. She has conducted national webinars on ECD and UDL for assessment.

Cameto oversaw the design and implementation of the National Study on Alternate Assessment (NSAA) with ED Institute of Education Science funding identifying the status of AA-AAS in the 50 states and the District of Columbia and surveying teachers on their perspectives on the implementation of the AA-AAS in their states. Cameto also has designed, implemented, and reported on other studies to validate state accountability assessments (Improving the OMAAP Reading Assessment for Oklahoma GSEG). Cameto has served as a principal analyst on many large-scale, longitudinal studies, including the original National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS), the Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study (SEELS), and the National Early Invention Study. For NLTS2 and SEELS, she focused on the design, implementation, and analysis of student assessment data.

Cameto co-directed the design and implementation of the NLTS2. In that role, she was centrally involved in the development of NLTS2’s overall design, data collection systems and procedures, and all instrumentation. She has authored multiple NLTS2 publications. Substantively, her work with NLTS2 has addressed the transition experiences of youth with disabilities in secondary school and their post-high school employment experiences and outcomes. Cameto currently provides intellectual and methodological direction on several IES-funded grants to support secondary analysis of NLTS2 including, an SRI project to apply propensity methods using NLTS2 data to identify factors associated with positive outcomes of youth with learning disabilities, emotional disturbances, or intellectual disabilities, and projects with the University of Kansas/University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois. Cameto also led the development and delivery of a number of IES-funded seminars on secondary analysis of NLTS2 and the online modules on the same topic (more information).

Cameto’s 35-year career in special education includes 15 years of direct service with students with significant cognitive disabilities and more than 25 years of research across the disability categories. 

Cameto holds a master’s degree in early childhood development and education from the University of San Francisco and a Ph.D. in special education from the University of California, Berkeley.