Fletcher, J. M., Francis, D. J., O’Malley, K., Copeland, K., Mehta, P., Caldwell, C. J., Kalinowski, S., Young, V., & Vaughn, S. (2009). Effects of a bundled accommodations package on high-stakes testing for middle school students with reading disabilities . Exceptional Children , 75 (4), 447–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/001440290907500404

Journal Article

Fletcher, J. M., Francis, D. J., O’Malley, K., Copeland, K., Mehta, P., Caldwell, C. J., Kalinowski, S., Young, V., & Vaughn, S. (2009). Effects of a bundled accommodations package on high-stakes testing for middle school students with reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 75(4), 447–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/001440290907500404

Tags

Learning disabilities; Middle school; Multiple day; No disability; Oral delivery; Oral delivery, live/in-person; Reading; U.S. context

URL

http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ecx

Summary

Accommodation

The bundled accommodations package studied included the structured extension of testing into two parts on successive days (instead of two days of unlimited time), the reading aloud of proper nouns, and the reading aloud of stems and of answer choices to the comprehension stems, at the conclusion of students reading the passages. The researchers reported separate effects for each accommodation.

Participants

Participants were 359 grade 7 students drawn from 17 middle schools in four suburban districts in southeast Texas (U.S.). These students were 191 average readers not receiving special education, and 168 poor readers receiving special education, including 122 with reading disabilities and 46 with dyslexia.

Dependent Variable

The dependent variable was participant scoring on an experimental version (2007) of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills grade 7 reading test.

Findings

First of all, the expected interaction effect between ability group and score did not occur—which means that both the students with disabilities and the students without disabilities benefited from the accommodation. Specifically, scores were higher for students without disabilities who participated in the 1-day and 2-day administrations in comparison with the standard administration. However, students with disabilities did benefit differentially from the read-aloud accommodation in comparison to the students without disabilities. A detailed discussion of issues related to the finding regarding the students without disabilities benefiting from the multiple day accommodation was provided.