The Need to Support Assessment

Certainly one of the most important and consequential elements of instruction is assessment. Whether assessment is embedded into teaching (e.g. curriculum-based measurement) or administered separately (e.g. large-scale assessment), it must provide students with adequate and equitable means to express their knowledge and understanding if it is to provide accurate feedback on the performance of students. UDL can provide great insights into how to accomplish this.

Unless a student with disabilities is provided access during testing to the supports they rely on in the classroom, they may not be able to show their knowledge and understanding. As a result, the validity of an assessment may be compromised. As an example, consider testing a student's ability to identify birds in the field without allowing him access to the binoculars he had been using in his biology class throughout the year. In this case, we would be preventing him from demonstrating his knowledge of birds, which is the learning goal being tested, by creating a barrier out of his visual acuity. This is analogous to the problems seen in the classroom discussed in the previous section: by failing to provide students with appropriate means of recognition, expression, and engagement, we're creating a barrier out of their disabilities and preventing learning. Withholding supports during testing further compounds these problems by requiring students to adopt a new set of strategies at a particularly inopportune moment: during a test. Unless students are tested in an environment that provides access and supports comparable to those they had during learning, the results of assessment are likely to be invalid.

The standard way to ensure that students have appropriate access during assessment is to provide testing accommodations. Examples of accommodations include administering tests in large print for a student with visual impairment or providing a student who is unable to write with a scribe to record her responses. Accommodations attempt to "level the playing field" so that tests fairly and accurately assess students' knowledge and abilities and not their disabilities. Quite simply, without accommodations many students with disabilities are effectively excluded from large-scale assessments.

Federal law is clear regarding the responsibility of state and local education agencies to provide students with disabilities access to appropriate testing accommodations. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments of 1997 (Public Law No. 105-17) require that large-scale assessment programs must include children with disabilities, if necessary through the use of appropriate accommodations and modifications in administration. A clarifying memorandum from the U.S. Department of Education this year states: "Assessment accommodations should be chosen on the basis of the individual student's needs and should generally be consistent with the accommodations provided during instruction."

However, existing testing accommodations are often limited in their effectiveness in two crucial ways by virtue of problems with how the accommodations are administered and by virtue of limitations in what accommodations can accomplish. In the following sections, we will discuss both types of limitations, starting with the former.