Large-Scale Assessments: A Teacher's Guide to Making Decisions about Accommodations

Large-scale assessments are an integral part of contemporary education.Such assessments raise questions about accommodations for students with disabilities.These questions may include the following:• What types of accommodations are available for large-scale assessments?• Who uses accommodations?• How should teachers and IEP teams select appropriate accommodations?This article provides recommendations and guidelines for decision making, in addition to offering a framework for special educators, especially members of individualized education program (IEP) teams, to use in selecting accommodations that permit students with disabilities to demonstrate knowledge, competence, and learning on large-scale assessments.The purpose of accommodations is to allow students with disabilities to demonstrate their knowledge on assess-ments without interference from their disabilities, as their nondisabled peers are able to do, while not giving students with disabilities an unfair advantage over their peers (Elliott, McKevitt, & Kettler, 2002).Because disabilities affect students in different ways, educators must consider the appropriateness of testing accommodations for each individual and must consider the accommodations available and the potential benefits of using each accommodation. What Types of Accommodations Are Available for Large-Scale Assessments?Although statewide assessments allow many different accommodations, they fall into five basic categories: presentation, time, setting, response, and aids (Jablonski, Edgemon, Wiley, & Lloyd, 2005) (see box "What Does Legislation Say About High-Stakes Testing?").Research provides guidance about using some accommodations for large-scale assessments for students with disabilities.However, researchers have ignored many accommodations, thereby failing to provide practitioners with evidencebased advice about using accommodations that intuitively seem promising.Furthermore, available evidence for many accommodations shows conflicting or equivocal results.The following is a summary of research related to the use and usefulness of the five categories of accommodations.