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Students with disabilities and without disabilities improved significantly when given standardized tests under accommodated conditions. Students with disabilities benefited more from accommodations on multiple choice questions, and both groups benefited equally on constructed response questions.

These findings result from a recent study by UW–Madison education professors Stephen N. Elliott, Thomas R. Kratochwill, and graduate student Aleta Gilbertson Schulte. They wished to determine whether accommodations on standardized tests would affect students with disabilities differently than they affect students without disabilities. The authors predicted that accommodations would significantly improve the test scores of students with disabilities, but would not significantly improve the test scores of students without disabilities.

The finding that both groups of students experienced benefits from testing accommodations indicates that the changes in test procedure may be affecting both construct-relevant and construct-irrelevant variance.

The differential 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 notion that research on testing accommodations must take an individual perspective, and that all students must take the tests in both accommodated and non-accommodated conditions, for researchers to determine whether accommodations truly help performance.

For more information, see http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/testacc/publications.html.