High-stakes testing of students with disabilities

Abstract

The study consists of a literature review and empirical study on the topic of high-stakes testing and the implications of those tests on students with disabilities. The study touches on subtopics such as the premise of high-stakes testing, test validity issues, advantages and disadvantages of including students with disabilities in high-stakes exams, and teacher roles in ensuring that high-stake exams are fairly administered to students with disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to examine teacher knowledge of appropriate testing accommodations for students with disabilities. Specific emphasis was placed on testing accommodations for tests considered to be "high-stakes". Information regarding teacher knowledge and opinion of allowable testing accommodation knowledge was be obtained by randomly surveying regular and special education teachers in the state of Wisconsin. Teachers were asked to identify allowable testing accommodations that may be used for students with disabilities and then state if they agree that the accommodation should be afforded to students. Both regular education special education teachers were surveyed in order to determine if there is a difference in accommodation knowledge between the two groups of teachers. This is important because all teachers who works with an individual student who has a disability should understand what types of testing accommodations might make the student's test scores more valid. Participants completed a survey in which they had to determine if 56 testing accommodations were allowable on high-stakes tests. The 56 items were all actually allowable as determined by the Office of Civil Rights. Although every item was actually allowable out of all participants there was not one item that had a 100% response rate of allowable. This would suggest that according to the data of the current study more knowledge regarding testing accommodations is warranted. There was not a significant difference between regular education and special education teachers' knowledge of testing accommodations.