Keeping Score for All The Effects of Inclusion and Accommodation Policies on Large-Scale Educational Assessments (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-9
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. Our adapted definition is as follows: accommodation is used as the general term for any action taken in response to a determination that an individual's disability or level of English language development requires a departure from established testing protocol.1 1The actual definition of accommodation in the standards appears in the chapter that deals with the testing of individuals with disabilities and reads as follows: "accommodation is used as the general term for any action taken in response to a determination that an individual's disability requires a departure from established testing protocol" (American Educational Research Association et al., 1999, p.
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However, the existing base of research about the effects of accommodations on test performance and the comparability of scores obtained under standard and accommodated conditions is insufficient to provide empirical support for many of the decisions that must be made regarding the testing of these students. Thus it has been difficult for both state and NAEP officials to make these decisions, and the result has been considerable variation in what is allowed, both from state to state and between NAEP and the state assessments.3 These kinds of variations in policy, combined with an insufficient research base, create significant impediments to the interpretation of assessment results for both students with disabilities and English language learners.
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POLICIES AND PROCEDURES FOR INCLUSION AND ACCOMMODATION States' policies and procedures for including students with disabilities and English language learners in large-scale assessments have evolved in recent years, and these policies remain in flux as officials strive to refine their procedures for inclusion and accommodation to comply with legislative mandates. These policies and procedures vary widely from state to state, in part because of differences among assessments and assessment systems, and state policies are different from those used for NAEP assessments.
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Recommendation 4-2: NAEP officials should work with state assessment directors to review the policies regarding inclusion and accommodation in NAEP assessments and work toward greater consistency between NAEP and state assessment procedures. Because NAEP is intended to report on the educational progress of students in the United States, it is important to evaluate the extent to which the results fully represent the student population in each state and in the nation.
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In the committee's view, it is important to know the extent to which the percentages in the NAEP reports correspond to the percentages of students with disabilities and English language learners reported in other sources. Furthermore, the committee believes that states are undertaking additional efforts at collecting such data, partly in response to the requirements of legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
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Validation studies in which evidence of criterion relatedness is collected have been conducted with the ACT and the SAT; similar studies should be conducted for NAEP and state assessments as well. We acknowledge that identification of appropriate criterion variables is more straightforward in the context of college admissions than in the K-12 context; however, we encourage efforts to identify and obtain reliable data on concurrent measures that can provide evidence of criterion validity for K-12 achievement results, such as grades, teacher ratings, or scores on other assessments of similar constructs.
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THE VALIDITY OF INFERENCES REGARDING ACCOMMODATED ASSESSMENTS In an evaluation of a testing program's policies regarding the accommodation of students with disabilities and English language learners, the validity of interpretations of the results should be the primary consideration. A test administered with an accommodation is intended to yield results that are equivalent to the results of a standard administration of the test to a student who has no disability and is fluent in English.
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While arguments in support of the validity of accommodated administrations of NAEP are discussed in some NAEP materials, more extensive and systematic investigation of the validity of inferences made from these scores is needed. At the same time, as has been noted, existing research does not provide definitive evidence about which procedures will, in general, produce the most valid estimates of performance for students with disabilities and English language learners.
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Thus it is essential that evidence of the validity of assessment results be thoroughly investigated to be sure that these results can provide useful information regarding students with disabilities and English language learners for schools, local jurisdictions, and the nation.
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