Universal Design for Assessment

In this article in Better: Evidence-Based Education, Benjamin Lovett (Elmira College) agues that giving students with special needs extra time on tests is not always appropriate. “Giving extended time accommodations is an attractive solution when young people with disabilities perform poorly on school assessments,” says Lovett. “The accommodations can raise performance, and they have also been shown to reduce test-related anxiety, making the assessment experience more comfortable.” But there are several caveats.

First, accommodations also benefit regular-education students, so giving them only to students with special needs can be unfair. Second, there’s the question of how much extra time should be given, and decisions tend to be quite arbitrary; in the U.S., 50-100 percent extra time is common, whereas in the U.K., it’s common to give only 10-25 percent extra. Third, time limits are an intrinsic part of some assessments; being able to read or compute fluently is an important life skill, and when extra time is given, teachers don’t get an accurate sense of how well a student is progressing. Finally, relaxing time limits may act as a crutch, keeping students with disabilities from developing the level of skill they will need in real-world settings. 

What should teachers do? Lovett believes accommodations should depend on the purpose of the assessment. If a test is designed to measure students’ reading speed, giving some students more time is inappropriate. If the test is measuring something other than speed, fluency, or automaticity, then time limits can be flexible – for all students. This approach has been called “universal design for assessment,” since it can benefit all students in different ways. 

What about a sixth-grade math test designed to see how efficiently students solve problems? In this case, a fixed amount of time is important, since students who take longer tend to be using immature problem-solving strategies that need to be corrected. In situations like this, Lovett says extra time would be appropriate only for students who have trouble accessing the test – for example, because of problems with reading. Individual diagnostic information should be used to decide who needs extra time. Lovett says that “accommodations are designed to increase access to the test, not to make up for lack of content mastery.” 

How should teachers decide how much additional time to give? Lovett says his research indicates that 25 percent extra time is usually enough to allow students with disabilities to attempt the same number of test items as their non-disabled peers. More time than that should be given only if a student isn’t getting to a similar number of assessment items as the rest of the class – and where speed is not being measured by the test. 

When accommodations are given, we shouldn’t assume that students will need them long-term, says Lovett. Interventions to improve students’ weak areas should be part of the plan – for example, having a slow reader repeatedly read the same passages to build fluency and speed. 

“Who Needs More Time (on Tests)?” by Benjamin Lovett in Better: Evidence-Based Education, Autumn 2013 (Vol. 5, #3, p. 14-15), no free e-link available

From the Marshall Memo #509