Education Week - April 3, 2013 - 16

EDUCATION WEEK

APRIL 3, 2013

www.edweek.org

On Common Tests,
No Easy Route
To Accommodations
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the wide variety of standardized reading and mathematics
tests used now. With a rollout of
the new assessments expected in
2014-15, test developers are aiming not only to streamline the
types of testing supports offered
to special education students and
English-language learners, but
also to make sure the tests are designed to be as broadly accessible
as possible to all students, regardless of their profiles.

Opening Doors
“We are in deep conversations
about what we can do to increase accessibility in a way that
benefits any student, including
English-language learners and
students with disabilities,” said
Danielle Griswold, a program associate for policy, research, and
design at the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, the consortium
of 22 states known as parcc.
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, composed of 24
states, is striving to do the same.
This no lightweight undertaking.
States do not have widely consistent rules on testing accom-

modations. Some states allow
test items to be read aloud, particularly for certain students with
disabilities, while others do not.
Some allow for test directions and
even test items to be translated
into other languages for Englishlearners, while others forbid it.
Officials with parcc and Smarter
Balanced agree that building consensus among the member states
is a challenge.
Federal education officials who
oversee policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress
have been wrestling with similar
issues as they seek to include
more students with disabilities
and ell students in the “nation’s
report card” and more accurately
allow for state-by-state comparisons of student achievement.
Exactly what the new landscape of testing accommodations
looks like will start to become
clearer to educators and the
public in the coming weeks and
months when parcc and Smarter
Balanced release more details
about their policies. In navigating this vexing territory, both
groups are zeroing in on what
research has found about the
impacts of accommodations on
students and identifying where
more research is needed.

SPECIAL-POPULATIONS TOOLKIT
Developers of the tests that will be aligned
with the Common Core State Standards are
working to design English/language arts and
mathematics assessments that accurately
measure the content skills of students with
disabilities and English-language learners.
ACCOMMODATIONS
Some testing accommodations under consideration by
the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College
and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment
Consortium include:
n Customized pop-up glossaries, which are dictionaries

designed specifically for each test item that students
can click on to define unfamiliar words.
n The use of calculators.
n A person or device recording a student’s dictated

answers.
n Word-prediction software that can access a bank of

frequently used words based on a student’s partial
spelling of words.

Guidelines
For Special Ed.
Under Way
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Thurlow said. The federally funded
nceo, based at the University of
Minnesota-Twin Cities, is working
with all the consortia tasked with
creating assessments for the common standards, which have been
adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia.

OTHER MOVING PARTS
Research Rationale: In May, states in Smarter
Balanced are to vote on a framework that describes
the research evidence that undergirds which
accommodations will ultimately be recommended
for use by English-learners and students with
disabilities.
PARCC Policy Manual: In April, the consortium
is to release a full policy manual that will include
specific accommodations it recommends for
English-learners and special-needs students.
Students With Severe Cognitive Impairments:
Two additional consortia—the National Center and
State Collaborative and Dynamic Learning Maps—are
working on tests to address the needs of students
with severe disabilities, along with lesson plans and
tools for teachers.
English-Language Proficiency Tests: Two other
groups of states—calling themselves ASSETS
and ELPA 21, for short—are crafting new Englishlanguage proficiency tests for ells that correspond
to the common standards.
SOURCES: Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium; Partnership
for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers

But putting a priority on the
needs of such a diverse group of
learners has also exposed the challenges underlying the task that the
consortia have set for themselves.
States that have widely differing
policies on handling accommodations, such as reading aloud as part
of a test, have to come together and
support a common policy. Disability-advocacy groups have registered
their concerns that the accommodations policies might create a new
level of bureaucracy that will ultimately make it harder for students
to get the supports they need. Technology experts wonder if the tests
will be able to be accessed by the

different devices and software packages now in use.
And looming over all those questions is a paramount instructional
concern: Even with a perfectly
designed and accessible test, will
students with disabilities get the
instruction they need to be able to
perform well?
Stephen N. Elliott, the director
of the Learning Sciences Institute at Arizona State University
in Tempe, has conducted research
that shows teachers spend about
80 percent of their instructional
time in the general education
classroom on instruction that relates to state standards. For stu-

Variable State Policies for ELLs Pose Assessment Challenges
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sessment of Readiness for College
and Careers—have been working
for months to develop guidelines
and policies on appropriate accommodations for English-learners and
students with disabilities.
So far, neither group has released a concrete set of policy
recommendations on the types
of supports that will be available
to ell test-takers within each
consortium, but both groups are
working on drafts for their members to consider.
Smarter Balanced and parcc officials say they are striving to make
test items on the computer-based
exams “accessible” to the widest
possible spectrum of students and
are drawing on evidence from research to inform their choices on
what types of accommodations
should be allowed.
Both groups also must reconcile accommodations policies that
vary widely across states. Among
parcc’s 22 members, for example,
Arizona and Massachusetts are
English-only states that provide
no native-language support to
ell test-takers, while in Illinois,
another parcc member, educators
are given discretion to provide
support such as test directions

presented orally in a student’s
first language.
“We are using research to drive
this process,” said Magda Chia,
the director of underrepresented
students for the 24-state Smarter
Balanced consortium. “We’re not
making decisions based on what
has been happening.”

Many Devices
Researchers estimate that states
and school districts collectively
have been drawing from as many
as 75 different testing accommodations for English-learners, many of
them designed originally for students with disabilities.
Both Smarter Balanced and
parcc have done surveys of their
member states to collect the number and types of testing supports
allowed for English-learners. Examples include giving ells extra
time to take their tests and providing commercial dictionaries to look
up unfamiliar words.
(Federal law requires that English-learners who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for at least
one year take state content tests
for accountability purposes.)
“The policies across the states
are really all over the map,” said
Tamara Reavis, parcc’s senior ad-

viser for assessment, accessibility,
and equity.
Other fairly common accommodations being used for ells are giving
tests in small groups and allowing
students to write answers in test
booklets rather than on an answer
sheet, said Jamal Abedi, an education professor at the University of
California, Davis, who is advising

“

anced, Mr. Abedi and four other colleagues, including Ms. Chia, pored
over the available research to develop a system for rating whether
specific testing accommodations
are effective in making a test item
more accessible to an Englishlearner, as well as whether they are
valid. To be valid, Mr. Abedi said,
an accommodation cannot alter the

When I look at an Englishlearner’s content-test results ...
in math, I don’t know if I am looking
at math or if I am looking at language.”
H. GARY COOK
Wisconsin Center for Education Research

the Smarter Balanced states on accommodations for English-learners.
Those accommodations, he said,
may not have “any relevance for
ells.”
“It’s one of the major misconceptions in accommodations,” he said.
“States use these tools for the sake
of accommodations with no consideration of whether it actually
makes the assessments more accessible to ells.”
At the behest of Smarter Bal-

construct of the item being tested,
meaning it can’t change what the
item is intended to measure.
“It’s not going to be valid to provide a test to a student in his or
her native language if all their
instruction has been in English,”
he said. “It may not help them and
could even hurt them.”
The Smarter Balanced team of
experts rated all the accommodations in use for ells and students
with disabilities in the consortium’s

member states and made recommendations to “use,” “use with
caution,” or “not use.” The accommodations that earned a “use” recommendation had to have sufficient
evidence in the research literature
that they both make the test items
more accessible to ells and do not
alter the construct of test items by
providing an unfair advantage.
A commercial dictionary is one
commonly used accommodation for
ells that the panel rated as one to
“use with caution,” Mr. Abedi said.
While dictionaries make test items
with unfamiliar words more accessible, they can also provide content
information that would render a
test-taker’s answer invalid.
To address that issue, both
Smarter Balanced and parcc have
been developing customized, digital “pop up” dictionaries that would
only provide definitions of words
that are unrelated to the content
being tested. All students, not just
ells and students with disabilities,
would be able to use those tools,
said Ms. Chia. (See Education Week,
December 7, 2012.)
Mr. Abedi is also urging the
Smarter Balanced states to weigh
the feasibility of accommodations
as they consider what to adopt.
One example of an accommodation that may not be feasible on

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Education Week - April 3, 2013

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