subject: Inclusion and Accommodation Policies [print this page] Inclusion and Accommodation Policies Inclusion and Accommodation Policies
As background, the speakers first discussed their research findings regarding states' inclusion and accommodation policies. Martha Thurlow discussed states' policies for including and accommodating students with disabilities; Lynne Sacks and Laura Golden provided similar information about states' policies for English-language learners. According to Thurlow, all states now have a policy that articulates guidelines for including and accommodating students with disabilities. These policies typically acknowledge the idea that some changes in administration practices are acceptable because they do not alter the construct tested, while others are unacceptable because they change the construct being assessed. Thurlow noted that the majority of states make a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable accommodations, but they use a variety of terminology to do so (e.g., accommodation vs. modification, allowed vs. not allowed, standard vs. nonstandard, permitted vs. nonpermitted, and reportable vs. not reportable).
For students with disabilities, accommodations are determined by the IEP teams, and they can be categorized as changes in the administration setting or timing (e.g., one-on-one administration, extended time), changes in test presentation (e.g., large print, Braille, read aloud), or changes in the mode for responding to the test (e.g., dictating responses, typing instead of handwriting responses, marking answers in the test booklet). In their presentations, Lynne Sacks and Laura Golden reported that all but one of the states have policies that articulate guidelines for including English-language learners in assessments. Forty-three states have policies for providing accommodations to English-language learners. All of these states allow English-language learners to test with accommodations, and 15 states expressly prohibit certain accommodations. This information is summarized in Figure 4-1. Accommodations for English-language learners can be classified as linguisticornonlinguistic. Non linguistic accommodations are those that have been traditionally offered to students with disabilities, such as extended time or testing in a separate room. Linguistic accommodations can be further categorized as English-language and native-language.
English-language accommodations assist the student with testing in English and indude adjustments such as repeating, simplifying, or clarifying test directions in English; the use of English-language glossaries; linguistic simplification of test items; and oral administration. Native-language accommodations allow the student to test in his or her native language and include use of a bilingual dictionary or a translator; oral administration in the student's native language; use of a translated version of the test; and allowing the student to respond in his or her native language. Results from the research by Sacks and Golden show that states offer more nonlinguistic than linguistic accommodations to English-language learners. For this part, learning a foreign language needs a leaning tools, many children choose Rosetta Stone Polish and Rosetta Stone Portuguese to learn Polish and Portuguese. Decision making about providing accommodations for English-language learners is complicated by the fact that these students do not have IEPs, which means that there is no common basis for making these decisions. States vary with respect to who makes the decision and how it is made. The 1998-1999 survey results indicated that most often the decision was simply to let the student use whatever accommodations he or she routinely uses in the classroom situation (Rivera et al., 2000).
