Digital Module 31: Testing Accommodations for Students with Disabilities

Students with disabilities often take tests under different conditions than their peers do. Testing accommodations, which involve changes to test administration that maintain test content, include extending time limits, presenting written text through auditory means, and taking a test in a private room with fewer distractions. For some students with disabilities, accommodations such as these are necessary for fair assessment; without accommodations, invalid interpretations would be made on the basis of these students’ scores. However, when misapplied, accommodations can also diminish fairness, introduce new sources of construct-irrelevant variance, and also lead to invalid interpretation of test scores. This module provides a psychometric framework for thinking about accommodations, and then explicates an accommodations decision-making framework that includes a variety of considerations. Problems with current accommodations practices are discussed, along with potential solutions and future directions. The module is accompanied by exercises allowing participants to apply their understanding.     

Causal Inference and COVID: Contrasting Methods for Evaluating Pandemic Impacts Using State Assessments

In the spring of 2021, just 1 year after schools were forced to close for COVID-19, state assessments were administered at great expense to provide data about impacts of the pandemic on student learning and to help target resources where they were most needed. Using state assessment data from Colorado, this article describes the biggest threats to making valid inferences about student learning to study pandemic impacts using state assessment data: measurement artifacts affecting the comparability of scores, secular trends, and changes in the tested population. The article compares three statistical approaches (the Fair Trend, baseline student growth percentiles, and multiple regression with demographic covariates) that can support more valid inferences about student learning during the pandemic and in other scenarios in which the tested population changes over time. All three approaches lead to similar inferences about statewide student performance but can lead to very different inferences about student subgroups. Results show that controlling statistically for prepandemic demographic differences can reverse the conclusions about groups most affected by the pandemic and decisions about prioritizing resources.     

“Acquired” Equals Addition? Associating Verbs with Arithmetic Operations Impacts Word Problem Performance

Successful word problem performance often requires understanding the linguistic relations between characters and objects. However, the keyword method promotes associating specific words with mathematical operations while neglecting the situational context. Research has thoroughly investigated the detrimental effects of individuals associating relational terminology (e.g., “more”) with mathematical operations (e.g., “addition”). The current study expands upon this line of research by examining whether undergraduate students associate verbs with mathematical operations and if verbal associations affect word problem performance. Similar to relational terminology, the participants associated verbs with operations, which significantly impacted performance. The educational implications are discussed.     

‘Neurodivergent literacies’: exploring autistic adults' ‘ruling passions’ and embracing neurodiversity through classroom literacies

The concept of neurodiversity has fuelled a social justice movement advocating for the rights of those whose lives diverge from a socially-constructed default. However, deficit understandings of disability persist in educational settings and neurodivergent people continue to face disadvantage and discrimination in organisations constructed on normative understandings of the world. Although New Literacy Studies is concerned with ideas of power, dominance and worth, there is a notable lack of work that connects NLS with issues of neurodiversity. In this paper, I introduce the term ‘neurodivergent literacies’ to propose a field of study that links the ideological model of literacy with the neurodiversity paradigm. From this starting point, I outline a project that examined literacies around what are often referred to as the ‘special interests’ of autistic people. Presenting data from interviews with 13 neurodivergent adults, related to school experiences and the literacies they engage with around their self-defined ‘ruling passions’, I make recommendations for literacies practitioners, arguing that schools need to do more to take account of difference and disability. By describing how ‘neurodivergent literacies’ can help teachers harness their own critical literacy skills to challenge deficit models of difference in the classroom, this paper illuminates how an understanding of neurodiversity is essential for anyone teaching and researching literacies with a commitment to social justice.