Test Accommodations for LEP Students (continued)

Some accommodations address environmental conditions that help students feel more comfortable, such as allowing the student to take the test in a familiar setting with a familiar teacher with other students receiving similar accommodations, or permitting a flexible schedule that includes shorter test sessions or more breaks. Administrative accommodations can include allowing the teacher to read directions aloud, repeating directions, and simplifying or clarifying directions (Rivera & Stansfield, 1998).

Several professional groups within the education and measurement communities have issued recent calls for research to identify appropriate, valid, and reliable accommodations for ELLs, including the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education (1999), the American Educational Research Association (2000), Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (2000), and the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (2000). Although research on accommodations for ELLs has begun to be reported on at conferences and to appear in the literature, studies involving accommodations seldom involve an experimental research design, making it difficult to determine the effects of accommodations on reliability, validity, and score comparability.

Measuring the Effects of Linguistic Simplification

When evaluating the efficiency of an accommodation, there are two issues to be determined. First, among those for whom it is not considered necessary, there is a need to understand whether the accommodation provides an unfair advantage to an examinee who receives it over one who does not. For example, would an English-speaking student who took a test in which the language had been simplified to aid comprehension get an improved score? Second, if among the first group, there is no advantage for those who receive it, then there is a need to uderstand whether the accommodation actually improves the performance of those who have special needs, for example, the English language learner. Would an LEP student demonstrate improved performance on a test that had been linguistically simplified over a test with standard wording?

One way to determine if an accommodation offers an unfair advantage, or whether it meaningfully assists students with special needs, is through an experimental design whereby students with and without the necessary condition are randomly assigned to treatments, with some students receiving the treatment and others not getting it. Two recent experimental studies that have explored the effects of linguistic simplification as an accommodation illustrate the complexity of the issue. One study (Abedi, Lord, & Hofstetter, 1998) involved mathematics items used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In the study, test booklets containing either a Spanish version, a simplified English version, or original NAEP math items (in un-simplified English) were randomly administered to 1,400 LEP and non-LEP eighth-graders in southern California middle schools. Only Hispanic students received the Spanish version. The simplified items were rewritten by content experts in linguistics and mathematics at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. The analyses indicated that both LEP and non-LEP students (that is, fully English proficient students) performed best on the simplified version, and worst on the Spanish version. While LEP and non-LEP students performed significantly better on the simplified items, significant differences in item difficulty were obtained on only 34 percent of the simplified items, leading the researcher to suggest that linguistic clarification of math items might be beneficial to all students. He also noted that other factors, such as length of time in the United States, English proficiency, reading competency, and prior math instruction had significant effects on scores.