Educators’ perceptions and documentation of testing accommodations for students with disabilities

Many educators have limited experience in planning and using testing accommodations for state and/or district testing. Recent changes in federal and state laws have confronted many educators with the requirement of using accommodations for students with disabilities in efforts to include them in assessments. This two-part investigation focused on educators’ use of the Assessment Accommodation Checklist (AAC) (Elliott, Kratochwill, & Schulte, 1996) to facilitate selection of assessment accommodations for two hypothetical students with disabilities who are taking either a test featuring multiple-choice items or performance tasks. The volunteer participants in this study included 92 educators from Wisconsin and 26 state-level educational leaders from across the United States. Results suggested that educators do not recommend significantly more accommodations for use with a student with a severe disability than a student with a more mild disability. However, educators recommended significantly more accommodations for use on a performance assessment task than on multiple-choice assessment tasks and rated one of the AAC categories, Providing Assistance During Administration, as more helpful and fair on the performance assessment task than on the multiple-choice tasks. Results also indicated educators rated the AAC as possessing good content validity. Furthermore, the educators implied the AAC is useful for generating ideas and documenting accommodations used for students with disabilities. The results of this study have implications for the participation of students with disabilities in large-scale assessments now required in many states and school districts.