Accommodations

Accommodations (definition): Any change to a test or testing situation that addresses a unique need of the student but does not alter the construct being measured.

Note: In general, accommodations involve changes to a test or testing situation and are used widely for the assessment of students who, because of limited proficiency in English or physical or cognitive disabilities, are deemed unable to participate meaningfully in state assessments without adjustments to the language or administration of the test. To be effective, accommodations must address the unique needs of the students for whom they are provided without invalidating the test construct.

In the case of ELLs, this means providing the test taker with assistance in overcoming the linguistic and socio-cultural barriers that prevent them from accessing the content of the test. Without this support, ELLs will, to a great extent, be tested on their knowledge of the language of the test rather than its content (Rivera, C., Collum, E, Shafer, L. & Sia, J., in press)

See also, the Department of Education's Fact Sheet: NCLB Provisions Ensure Flexibility and Accountability for Limited English Proficient Students

Key Issues

• Why allow ELLs to use accommodations during testing?

Accommodations help ELLs to gain access to the content of a test by enabling students to overcome linguistic and socio-cultural barriers. The lingistic and socio-cultural scaffolding offered by accommodations is needed during testing because second language acquisition research has shown that, during the early stages of second language acquisition, language learners require more cognitive resources to process the target language than peers who are more proficient in that target language (i.e., English).

• What rationales support the use of accommodations?

ELLs are at unfair linguistic disadvantage during testing given via the English language. Why? Specially, during the early stages of second language acquisition, learners need to attend closely to the forms of the target language: That is, in order to extract meaning from an utterance or text, their attention is closely directed toward linguistic structures, lexical items, and phonological features of the target language. Because of this attentional focus, second language learners tend to process language unit by unit, piece by piece, focusing closely on each discrete element of language rather than the underlying meaning of the unit as a whole. In contrast, native or fully proficient language learners have largely automatized language processing, giving only peripheral attention to each discrete element of language (McLaughlin, Rossman, & McLeod, 1983; McLaughlin, 1990).

The implications for the assessment of ELLs are clear. When faced with a standardized test, fully English-proficient students, who have automatized language processing, need fewer cognitive resources for language processing and therefore have more resources to attend to the meaning conveyed in the test. By contrast, ELLs who have not fully automatized language processing must direct more cognitive resources to processing the language of the test and therefore have fewer resources available to attend to content being tested. Accommodations are intended to minimize the cognitive resources ELLs need to process the language of the test and maximize the cognitive resources available for accessing the content of the test.

• What validity issues are associated with the use of accommodations?

A key concern surrounding the use of accommodations is to provide support to ELLs in processing the language of the test without providing help on the test's content. In other words, a state assessment administered to ELLs with accommodations must maintain its original purpose, assess the original construct, and yield scores that are comparable to those of other students taking the test without accommodation.