Gibson, D., Haeberli, F. B., Glover, T. A., & Witter, E. A. (2003). The use of recommended and provided testing accommodations (WCER Working Paper No. 2003–8). University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin Center for Education Research. https://wcer.wisc.edu/publications/workingPapers

Working Paper No. 2003-8 (July 2003) downloadable from webpage: https://wcer.wisc.edu/publications/abstract/wcer-working-paper-no.-2003-8 ​

The focus was on describing patterns of accommodations recommended by teachers, and then actually used by students with disabilities during mathematics and reading tests. The study findings provided substantial detail about the 67 accommodations on the study's primary measure, the Assessment Accommodations Checklist.

A total of 181 students with disabilities (82 in grade 4, and 99 in grade 8) from 15 schools throughout Wisconsin (U.S.) participated. This analysis focused on the participants with disabilities, from a larger series of studies that employed matched pair comparisons with students without disabilities. Documented disabilities for the sample included: autism, cognitive disability, emotional-behavioral disability, learning disability, and visual impairment. The students' 39 teachers reported the data for each of the student participants. 

The Assessment Accommodations Checklist (AAC; Elliott et al., 1999) was completed for each student participant by their teacher. The AAC's 67 listed accommodations are organized into eight categories on the AAC: (a) supports before testing, (b) motivation supports, (c) scheduling accommodations, (d) setting accommodations, (e) test directions assistance, (f) supports during test administration, (g) equipment including assistive technology, and (h) test format accommodations. "The results were aggregated by grade level and total number of students" (p. 6), reporting each AAC domains' 10 accommodations of most frequency, recommended and used. Although the test scores were not examined in this study, students completed large-scale assessments in order to gather observations of the accommodations they used. The assessments included two math and two reading subtests from the TerraNova Mathematics and TerraNova Reading Tests (research edition).

IEP teams and teachers frequently recommend certain accommodations over others (extended-time, alternative location, read-aloud directions, simplify language, and read-aloud questions were common). Challenges also existed in implementing accommodations, such as student refusal in accepting the accommodation.