Education Week - April 3, 2013 - 17

EDUCATION WEEK

Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards
and the common assessments is supported in part by a grant from the GE
Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.

dents with disabilities, the time
spent on standards-based instruction drops to about 50 percent.
“Instead of asking did [students
with disabilities] get an appropriate accommodation, ask, ‘Did they
have an opportunity to learn?’ ” Mr.
Elliott said.

coalition of advocacy groups did not
like the suggestion that only certain
types of students should be able to
use certain accommodations. For
example, parcc’s draft policy, which
will be open for additional comment

Varied Approaches

We’re
getting better
tests and
better testing
procedures.
I think, though,
the real issue
is back in the
classroom.”

The two largest consortia working
on tests for students with disabilities, the Partnership for Assessment
of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, have taken
different approaches to drafting an
accommodations and accessibility
policy for students with disabilities.
P arcc ’s approach has been
higher-profile because the consortium intentionally opened up some
hot-button issues for public review.
It sought comments for proposed
policies in how to handle the use of
read-aloud accommodations on English and literacy tests; calculators;
word-prediction software that allows
students to produce an entire word
from a few keystrokes; and a human
or computer-based scribe that can
take down a student’s spoken words.
The consortium gauged its audience correctly when it assumed that
its proposed policies on those issues
would draw interest: It received
3,500 responses to a survey it created to gauge opinion, as well as
written correspondence on the issue.
Among the commenters was the
Consortium of Citizens with Disabilities. The Washington-based

a large scale, he said, is a oneon-one test setting for students
to take their exams with only an
adult educator present.

‘Language-Complexity Tool’
Smarter Balanced officials are
conducting thorough evaluations
of the level of difficulty of the language used in each test item they
write to determine whether it can
be made simpler without changing
what items are meant to measure.
H. Gary Cook and Rita MacDonald, English-language-acquisition
researchers at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research based
at the University of WisconsinMadison, developed a “languagecomplexity tool” for test designers.
It is intended to help them figure
out how dense the ideas packed
into the language of a test item
are, and if the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax are more sophisticated than is necessary to measure whatever piece of knowledge
or skill an item is seeking.
The tool is actually a rubric that
test writers can use to assign numbers to the various language-complexity components of a test item.
“The question test designers can
ask is, ‘Does the language need to
be this sophisticated in order to
get at what you are trying to measure?’ ” said Mr. Cook.
“And it will ultimately be very
useful for accountability purposes,

“

STEPHEN N. ELLIOTT
Arizona State University

later this month, says that readaloud accommodations on English
and literacy tests should only be
used by students who have disabilities that severely limit access
to print, or students with visual impairments who have not yet learned
Braille. From the perspective of the
disability coalition, such a policy
would turn the focus to the student,
when attention should be paid to
what the test question is attempting to measure.
But the creators of the policy said

because right now, when I look at
an English-learner’s content-test
results, especially in math, I don’t
know if I am looking at math or if
I am looking at language,” he said.
“This helps us untangle the language better.”
Parcc is also “looking very
closely at issues of language complexity and how it ties into assessment,” said Ms. Reavis.
“We want the language level of a
test item to be in balance with the
cognitive level,” Ms. Reavis said.
Ultimately, both common-core-assessment consortia say they want to
create assessments and accommodations policies that can be widely
used by all students, whether they
are English-learners, have a disability, or are in general education.
But even with the most accessible
test design, ells will still struggle to
demonstrate what they truly know
if their teachers aren’t prepared to
help them develop their academiclanguage skills across the content
areas, said Mr. Abedi. The language
demands in the common standards
are much more sophisticated than
what they have been in most existing state content standards.
“Just look at the kindergarten
math standards, where students
are being asked to ‘describe’ and
‘explain’ and ‘elaborate’ their answers in written language,” Mr.
Abedi said. “If they are going to succeed, all teachers must teach them
the language.”

that their work, done in consultation with technical advisers, is more
liberal than what is now allowed in
many states.
“We’re actually opening a lot of
doors that have been closed for
these students in many states,” said
Tamara Reavis, the senior adviser
for assessment, accessibility, and equity at parcc.
Ms. Reavis said the test creators
envision having a tiered system of
accessibility and accommodations.
Some features would be accessed
by the student, and others would require school and teacher intervention
before the student could use them.
Parcc says it is open to making
additional changes if needed after
results from pilot testing come in.
“We are leaving it open that we
can have a ‘version two’ we can release in fall 2014, if we have further
data and other things we need to
change,” said Danielle Griswold, a
program associate for parcc policy,
research, and design.
Smarter Balanced plans to release a framework that shows the
research underpinning its accommodation policy later this month.
Later, the organization plans to produce a document that lists accommodations students can use. The
organization also plans to produce
professional-development modules
that will help school-based teams
determine which accommodations
work best for a particular student.
Some accommodations, such as
extended time, will probably be
subsumed into the larger pool of
“accessibility” options, according to
officials of Smarter Balanced.
“We’re creating a lot of material

APRIL 3, 2013

that’s pushing the field forward,”
said Magda Chia, the director of
support for underrepresented students at Smarter Balanced. “We’re
pushing the accessibility piece of the
assessments forward by leaps and
bounds.”

Severe Cognitive Issues
Two additional, smaller consortia,
one known as the National Center and State Collaborative and
the other called Dynamic Learning
Maps, are working on assessments
that will be appropriate for students
with severe cognitive impairments.
Teachers of students with severe
disabilities are hungry for detailed
lesson plans that link to the college- and career-ready standards of
the common core, said Rachel Quenemoen, the project director for the
National Center and State Collaborative. The ncsc has made a comprehensive system of instruction and
assessment an explicit goal, she said.
Neal Kingston, the project director
for Dynamic Learning Maps, said
that organization is creating assessments that will be embedded within
the day-to-day instruction that such
students receive. Student learning
is therefore tracked throughout the
year.
“We have created instructional
materials, that, if we’ve succeeded,
teachers would use even if there
were no assessment involved with
them,” Mr. Kingston said. “And we’re
embedding them in a technology
system that allows us to make useful inferences from the activities you
would do anyway.”
But some experts wonder if the

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groups, particularly the larger consortia, are pushing hard enough to
create new ways of assessing students.
Dave Edyburn, a professor in the
department of exceptional education
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an adviser for parcc, has
argued in favor of broader access to
the same technology those with disabilities would use in college or their
careers.
“We should be inspired by what’s
happening in real life,” he said.
Diane Cordry Golden, the policy coordinator for the Missouri Council of
Administrators of Special Education,
said the consortia seem to be working to embed their tools within the
tests, but students with disabilities
may struggle to learn an unfamiliar
process.
Allowing a student to use an onscreen calculator, for example, may
not help if the student is used to
using a calculator with large buttons, or one with a computer-generated voice, said Ms. Golden, a former
special education administrator who
also serves as the project coordinator
for the Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs.
“There’s just a lot of things that appear to be unresolved regarding access features this far in the process,”
she said.
And there is still the continuing
issue of access to the academic content in the classroom, a concern for
both general educators and special
educators.
“We’re getting better tests and better testing procedures,” Mr. Elliott
said. “I think, though, the real issue
is back in the classroom.”

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Education Week - April 3, 2013

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