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

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

Examining a Multisemiotic Approach to Measuring Challenging Content for English Learners and Others: Results from the ONPAR Elementary and Middle School Science Study

This study contributes to the empirical research base on the effectiveness of ONPAR, a promising multisemiotic test item development process. ONPAR uses a variety of multisemiotic performance techniques to present and measure challenging concepts and skills of students, including low English proficient English Learners (ELs) and non-ELs. Experimental trials were used to investigate how 648 ELs at three English proficiency levels and native English speaking non-ELs performed on randomly assigned 4th and 8th grade traditional items and equivalent ONPAR items of challenging science content. General linear modeling using a covariate variable of classroom performance and bi- and multi-nomial regressions found differential boost across both grades. That is, findings showed that lower English proficient ELs perform better on ONPAR vs traditional forms in both grades, with p < .05 in favor of ONPAR in grade 8, whereas there were no significant differences between the two forms for non-ELs. The results also underscore the viability of the assessment methodology where students often demonstrate their response by showing their knowledge and skills. Item level results indicate that the ONPAR approach is useful at mitigating the effect of group