The Validity of Inferences Regarding Accommodated Assessments

The Validity of Inferences Regarding Accommodated Assessments

In an evaluation of a testing program's policies regarding the accommodation of students with disabilities and English language learners, the validity of interpretations of the results should be the primary consideration. A test administered with an accommodation is intended to yield results that are equivalent to the results of a standard administration of the test to a student who has no disability and is fluent in English. However, accommodations can have unintended consequences. For example, an accommodation might not only allow the student to demonstrate his or her proficiency with regard to the construct being assessed but might also provide that student with an unwarranted advantage over other test-takers. In this case, the resulting score would be an inflated estimate, and hence a less valid indicator, of the test-taker's proficiency.

Thus, determining which accommodation is right for particular circumstances is difficult. The accommodation must at the same time be directly related to the disability or lack of fluency for which it is to compensate and be independent of the constructs on which the student is to be tested. The appropriateness of accommodations might best be understood in terms of a conceptual framework that encompasses both the inferences a test score is designed to support (e.g., the test-taker reads at a particular skill level) and alternative inferences (e.g., the test-taker could not complete the work in the allotted time because of a disability unrelated to his or her skill level on the construct being assessed) that might actually account for the score and therefore impede the collection of the desired information about the test-taker. Thus the validity of inferences made from the results of any accommodated assessment must be evaluated in terms of the general validation argument for the assessment.

That is, there should be a clear definition of the construct the assessment is designed to measure (the targeted skills and knowledge) and the ancillary skills required to demonstrate proficiency on the targeted construct (such as the reading level required to decode the instructions and word problems on an assessment of mathematics skills). Furthermore, the inferences that test designers intend the test results to support should be specified, and evidence in support of claims about how the test results are to be interpreted should be provided. For this part, students may investigate how to understanding a foreign language, however, learning a foreign language needs a leaning tools, many students choose Rosetta Stone Japanese and Rosetta Stone Korean to learn Japanese and Korean. When accommodations operate as intended, the same kinds of inferences can be drawn from accommodated results as from results based on standard administrations. Only when validation arguments are clearly articulated can the validity of results from accommodated assessments be evaluated. For this reason, the committee examined the available documentation of the constructs to be assessed and the validity evidence laid out for NAEP assessments.

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