ABOUT WCER NEWS Events Cover Stories Research News International Research Press WHAT'S THE RESEARCH ON...? PROJECTS All Active Projects All Completed Projects PUBLICATIONS LECTURE SERIES PEOPLE Staff Directory Project Leaders ERG - EVALUATION RESOURCES GROUP RESOURCES Conference Rooms Equipment GRANT SERVICES GRADUATE TRAINING SERVICE UNITS Director's Office Business Office Technical Services Printing & Mail EMPLOYMENT CONTACT INFO MyWCER WORKSPACE LOGIN

Steve Elliott	Tom Kratochwill

Recent education reform efforts require high standards for all students. The inclusion of students with disabilities in statewide assessment systems is now required by law and considered to represent a key aspect of good testing practices. From social and accountability perspectives, this inclusion of students with disabilities is highly valued, especially when their test scores are known to be valid. Unfortunately, many students with disabilities receive testing accommodations of unknown validity.

Including students with disabilities in assessment is important for two reasons:

1. It is critical to improving the quality of the educational opportunities available to these students.
2. It provides meaningful and useful information about students’ performance to the schools and communities that educate them.

Inclusion raises important questions, however. How appropriate are common performance standards for students with disabilities? What accommodations should be used? What are the effects of testing accommodations on the validity of assessment? How should scores be reported when accommodations have been used?

Education leaders at state and district levels struggle with these issues as they work to create policies for testing students with disabilities. In the past, many students with disabilities have been excluded from large-scale achievement tests. Reasons for the exclusion of students with disabilities are varied, but the most common are confusion about the use of test accommodations, concern over causing undue stress from testing, and fear that district test scores will go down.

Four recent experimental studies conducted by UW-Madison Education Professors Stephen N. Elliott and Thomas R. Kratochwill and their graduate students, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, shed some light on current questions about the effects of accommodations on test scores of students with and without disabilities.

1. describe the nature of information on testing accommodations listed in students’ individualized education programs (IEPs),;
2. document the testing accommodations educators actually use when administering performance assessments to students; and
3. examine the effect accommodations have on the test results of students with and without disabilities.

The study found that accommodations were recommended in packages rather than individually – for example, the instructor might offer a combination of verbal encouragement, reading the directions aloud, simplifying some language, and rereading subtask directions. These accommodation packages were found to have moderate to large effects on performance assessment scores for most students with disabilities and for some students without disabilities. This increase in scores for students without disabilities raises questions about the validity of the accommodations. If changes in testing procedure affect students without disabilities in the same direction and degree as they affect students with disabilities, the changes are not truly acting as accommodations.

Constructed-response questions

Graduate student Aleta Gilbertson Schulte conducted a study supervised by Elliott and Kratochwill (2001) to determine whether accommodations on standardized tests affect students with disabilities differently than students without disabilities. The researchers predicted that accommodations would significantly improve the test scores of fourth-grade students with disabilities but not those of students without disabilities.

In fact, both groups of students improved significantly in the accommodated condition as compared with the nonaccommodated condition. Although students with disabilities benefited more than students without disabilities from accommodations on multiple-choice questions, the two groups benefited equally from accommodations on constructed-response questions.

The finding that both groups of students experienced benefits from testing accommodations on constructed-response questions indicates that the changes in test procedure may have affected both construct-relevant and construct-irrelevant variance. The interaction between accommodation group and question type could indicate that constructed-response questions are more difficult for all students and that accommodations remove barriers to these questions that are not present in multiple-choice questions.

These findings reinforce the principle that research on testing accommodations must take an individual perspective, and that all students must take the tests in both accommodated and nonaccommodated conditions if researchers are to determine whether accommodations provide valid information on student learning.

Extended time for tasks

In a dissertation study (2000), Ann Marquart examined the use of an extended-time accommodation on student scores on an eighth-grade mathematics test. Marquart found that giving students extended time to complete the test (40 minutes, rather than 20 minutes) did not have significant results for students with or without disabilities.

However, in a survey Marquart administered to students and their parents and teachers, most students reported feeling more comfortable, more motivated, and less frustrated under the extended-time condition. They thought they performed better, reported the test seemed easier, and preferred taking the test under the extended-time condition. Most teachers, but few parents indicated that a score from an accommodated test is as valid as a score from the same test administered without accommodations. Many parents, but no teachers believed that the score from an accommodated test is less valid than the score from a nonaccommodated test, and some members from both groups were uncertain. Most parents and teachers believed that if accommodations are used during test administration, those accommodations should be reported along with the test results.

Reading test accommodations

Graduate student Brian McKevitt studied the effects of testing accommodations on the scores of eighth-grade students on standardized reading tests, on score validity, and on teacher and student attitudes about testing (2001).

McKevitt found that the accommodations recommended by teachers did not significantly affect the test scores of students with or without disabilities. However, a read-aloud accommodation, when used with accommodations recommended by teachers, did positively and significantly affect test scores for both groups of students.

There was much individual variability in the accommodation effects. The accommodations raised the scores for 50% of all students with disabilities and 38% of all students without disabilities. Although the scores of both groups were higher with the read-aloud than without any accommodation, the read-aloud effect was not significant when the scores of groups receiving the read-aloud accommodation were compared with the scores of groups receiving only the teacher-recommended accommodations.

Elliott notes that educators who have cooperated with him and his students have rarely requested a summary of research on the effective use of testing accommodations. Perhaps they recognize there is little research on this issue, he says. “If research is going to guide practice, researchers and test publishers interested in seeing all students participate meaningfully in assessments will need to help front-line educators more,” he says. They need to understand which testing accommodations are most likely to be valid and how they can go about making decisions about the validity of testing accommodations for individual students prior to testing.”

For more information, visit the testing accommodations research Web site at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/testacc/.