Research Impact on State Accommodation Policies for Students with Disabilities

Recently, there has been more attention to the issues concerning accommodations for students with disabilities. Documentation of assessment accommodation policies for students with disabilities have also noted both an increase in the number of states with policies for students with disabilities and an increase in the sophistication of the policies. Research findings for accommodations provided to students with disabilities have been complex, yet still have pushed states to make a better determination of their policies and practices. This paper summarizes research findings on accommodations for students with disabilities and discusses the nature of accommodation policies, including recent specifications about the scoring and aggregation of test scores and the use of “access assistants.” There are many definitions of testing “accommodations, ” yet all now converge on the same concepts. In general, any type of change to testing materials, setting, or procedures that does not alter what is being measured is considered to be an accommodation. Some researchers refer to the elimination of construct irrelevant variance, in other words, the variance associated with extraneous features of test administration (Fuchs, Fuchs, Eaton, Hamlett, & Karns, 2000). Demonstrations of test changes that maintain the validity of the construct that an assessment is attempting to measure have been challenging for the field, and numerous approaches to research have been pursued (Thurlow