Test Accommodations for Disabilities

Introduction

Access to educational opportunity or to the workplace often requires taking a standardized objective or performance test. For most people, taking on-demand exams present little difficulty, at least in terms of the form, structure, or procedures used by the test to assess the skill or learning construct. For individuals with disabilities, however, the structural characteristics of a test may present barriers that interfere with the assessment, yielding results that are inaccurate representations of what an individual knows or can do. For this reason, individuals with disabilities may take a test with an accommodation (i.e. adjustment) to the material used for the test, the procedure or procedures for administering the test, or to the way they respond. Accommodations are intended to remove or diminish the impact of the disability on test performance without invalidating the test construct or the score. Specifically, it is discriminatory to use selection criteria based on tests that screen out or tend to screen out individuals with disabilities unless the criteria are shown to be job-related, consistent with a business necessity, or related to a prescribed admissions standard. A test accommodation is called for when the test process or procedure requires an individual with a disability to use the impaired skill(s). Test accommodations are not testing modifications although the terms are often used interchangeably. Generally, an accommodation is considered a change in the way a test is administered but does not alter the construct and a modification is considered a change in the content of the test and may alter the intended construct.

With the onset of high stakes testing for school accountability purposes and access to post secondary institutions and eventually to employment opportunities accommodations have become commonplace when people with disabilities take on demand tests. Tests are not to act as barriers to the employment or admission to school of persons with disabilities unless the person is unable to do the job or be successful in school, even with reasonable accommodation.

Characteristics of Test Accommodations

There is no approved set of assessment accommodations but most people agree that accommodations can be classified as adjustments to test setting, item presentation, time limits, response formats and test schedule. The most commonly used accommodations involve (1) changes in timing or scheduling, (2) special arrangements about where the test is taken, (3) allowing non-standard modes for responding, (4) Braille or large print, (5) reading questions or content aloud to a test taker, and (6) permitting individuals to engage test items using non-standard presentation formats (Thurlow, Scott & Ysseldyke, 1995). Much variability exists in how accommodations are employed as singular adjustments, or in combination, and research revealing their impact is just emerging. Indeed, accommodation research is difficult to design and perhaps even more difficult to interpret. Accommodations are designed to address individual needs so group data may be confounded by the complexities of interactions between subjects who may or may not need the particular accommodation(s) being tested.

Psychometric Issues and Accommodations

Studies have analysed the effects of accommodations on test scores. For the most part, these studies have analysed large data sets collected from tests that use item formats that require examinees to ‘select a response’ in the form of multiple-choice or other objective items. Much less research has been completed using ‘performance-based items’, or items where examinees are asked to ‘construct a response’. Clearly, accommodations allowed for one item format for one construct might not be appropriate when assessing the same construct using a different item format. These complexities add to the difficulty of conducting these studies.

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