Framing Appropriate Accommodations in Terms of Individual Need: Examining the Fit of Four Approaches to Selecting Test Accommodations of English Language Learners

Abstract

Providing appropriate test accommodations to most English language learners (ELLs) is important to facilitate meaningful inferences about learning. This study compared teacher large-scale test accommodation recommendations to those from a literature- and practitioner-grounded accommodation selection taxonomy. The taxonomy links student-specific needs, strengths, and schooling experiences to large-scale test accommodation recommendations that differentially minimize barriers of access for students with different profiles. A blind panel of experts rated four sets of recommendations for each of 114 ELLs. Results found the taxonomy was a significantly better fit for distinguishing accommodations by student need than teacher recommendations. Further, the fit of teacher recommendations showed no difference when the teacher used a structured data collection procedure to gather profile information about each of their ELLs and when they did not, and teachers’ recommendations were not found to differ significantly from a random set of accommodations. Findings are consistent with previous literature that suggests the task of matching specific accommodations to individual needs, rather than the task of identifying individual needs, is where teachers struggle in recommending appropriate test accommodations.

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