How Testing Accommodations Help
|
Stephen Elliott & Thomas
Kratochwill
|
In recent research for the U.S. Department of Education, UW-Madison education professors Stephen N. Elliott and Thomas R. Kratochwill found that testing accommodations have a positive effect on the reading and math scores of most students with and without disabilities. Testing accommodations are changes made to the administration of standardized tests to provide students with disabilities the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of constructs measured by the tests without the interference of their disability.
The study was designed to address questions about the effect and consequences of testing accommodations on the scores of fourth- and eighth-grade students taking equivalent short forms of a mathematics test and a reading test used in statewide assessment programs. This research contributes to a greater understanding of the impact of testing accommodations on the validity of the inferences made about students’ test scores and on consequential aspects of testing accommodations.
Accommodations can take different forms, including changes to the setting, test presentation, response format, and timing. As mandated by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 1997), accommodations are chosen for individual students based on their unique needs. Often these needs are identified through a student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP). Other times, teachers make decisions about testing accommodations based on their judgments of the conditions in which their students can accurately demonstrate their knowledge.
The most frequently recommended and actually implemented testing accommodations for a common mathematics test included reading directions, providing extra time, and reading questions and item content to students. The most frequently recommended and actually implemented testing accommodations for a common reading test included reading directions, providing extra time, allowing responses to be marked in the test book, and reading questions and content to students.
Testing accommodations have become a necessary component of large-scale assessments that include students with disabilities. A central question when providing testing accommodations for students with disabilities on standardized tests is whether the scores of those students are comparable to the scores of a student without disabilities who did not receive accommodations.
Elliott and Kratochwill found that testing accommodations have a differential effect on the reading scores of students with and without disabilities, resulting in a meaningful increase in the scores of students with disabilities. There also appears to be a relationship between students’ perceptions of accommodations and their performance, though the vast majority of the correlations were not significant.
Most students indicated a preference for testing accommodations, and most students reported feeling that testing accommodations were fair for students with and without disabilities.
Testing accommodations had an overall positive effect on all students’ reading scores, although students’ disability status and grade level did impact resulting reading scores. Specifically, students without disabilities and students in eighth grade demonstrated higher reading scores than did students with disabilities and students in fourth grade. The data indicated that testing accommodations had a significantly larger positive effect on the reading scores of students with disabilities, when compared to students without disabilities.
Testing accommodations had an overall positive effect on the math scores of both groups of students. The effect of testing accommodations on students’ math performance was positive, yet not significantly different for students with or without disabilities.
Most students’ perceptions of accommodations were positive, as indicated by the student preferring the accommodated test condition. When students were asked to indicate their overall preference for one of the test conditions, 83% of the students indicated that they either preferred the accommodated condition, or felt that the two test conditions were the same.
Collectively, this research on the effects and consequences of testing accommodations on students’ performance and perceptions provides some evidence for the validity of testing accommodations and resulting test scores for students with disabilities and the consequential validity of the resulting scores for all students.
Funding for this research was provided by U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education & Rehabilitative Services.
|
