Schulte, A. G., Elliott, S. N., & Kratochwill, T. R. (2000, June). Experimental analysis of the effects of testing accommodations on students’ standardized mathematics test scores [Paper presentation]. Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) National Conference on Large-Scale Assessment, Snowbird, UT, United States.

Students with disabilities received accommodations based on their individual needs. Each student without a disability was randomly assigned to receive a set of accommodations corresponding to one of the students with disabilities. All students completed one form of the test without accommodations and one form of the test with accommodations.

Eighty-six fourth-grade students participated in the study (36 females and 50 males). Forty-three of these students were identified with disabilities by the state of Wisconsin or Iowa. These included students with learning disabilities, speech/language disabilities, and mild cognitive disabilities. All students were Caucasian with the exception of one African-American student.

The TerraNova Multiple Assessment Battery (CTB/McGraw-Hill, 1997c) mathematics subtest was used as the dependent variable. This assessment is composed of three parts:
Part One: Computation problems, simple word problems requiring single computation, and estimation skills.
Part Two: Concepts and application skills; problems require a variety of strategies to arrive at solutions.
Part Three: Constructed-response items in which students have to describe solutions and evaluate problem situations.

Both students with and without disabilities, as groups, experienced a beneficial effect from test accommodations. Although students with disabilities experienced a larger effect in the accommodated condition than did students without disabilities, the difference between groups was not significant. Students with disabilities profited more than students without disabilities on the multiple-choice items, but not the constructed response items. The accommodation package of extra time and read test items to student did not have a differential impact for students with disabilities when compared to students without disabilities. Students with disabilities receiving accommodation packages other than just extra time and read test items to student experienced a statistically significant and differential impact of testing accommodations on math scores. [See also Schulte, Elliott, & Kratochwill, 2000; Schulte, Elliott, & Kratochwill, 2001]