McKevitt, B., Marquart, A., Mroch, A., Schulte, A. G., Elliott, S. N., & Kratochwill, T. R. (1999, August). Test accommodations for students with disabilities: An empirical analysis . Annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA), Boston, MA, United States.

Two accommodation conditions were studied: a standard accommodations condition—composed of extra time (extended-time), support with understanding directions, and help with reading words—and an individualized accommodation condition. Students with disabilities took the assessment both without accommodations and with the accommodations listed on their IEPs. Students without disabilities were placed in either a non-accommodated, standard accommodations, or teacher-recommended accommodations condition.

One-hundred (100) grade 4 students from Wisconsin (U.S.) participated. A total of 59 students were reported to have no disabilities, and 41 were identified as students with disabilities—including learning disabilities, emotional disabilities, cognitive disabilities, speech and language disabilities, autism, health impairments, and hearing impairments.

Science and math performance assessments were developed as part of the Wisconsin Student Assessment System project in 1993–1995.

Accommodations had a large positive effect on 63.4% of students with disabilities and 42.9% of students without disabilities receiving the teacher-recommended accommodations and on 20% of students with disabilities receiving the standard accommodation package. Accommodations had a medium to large positive effect on more than 75% of students with disabilities and also on 55% of students without disabilities. Accommodations had a negative effect on scores of 17% of students with disabilities and 7% or less of students without disabilities. [See also McKevitt, 2000; Elliott et al., 1999; McKevitt et al., 2000; Elliott et al., 2001.]