The U.S. federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was enacted with goals of closing achievement gaps and providing all students with access to equitable and high-quality instruction. One requirement of ESSA is annual statewide testing of students in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Some students, including many deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students, are eligible to use test supports, in the form of accommodations and accessibility tools, during state testing. Although technology allows accommodations and accessibility tools to be embedded within a digital assessment system, the success of this approach depends on the ability of test developers to appropriately represent content in accommodated forms. The Guidelines for Accessible Assessment Project (GAAP) sought to develop evidence- and consensus-based guidelines for representing test content in American Sign Language. In this article, we present an overview of GAAP, review of the literature, rationale, qualitative and quantitative research findings, and lessons learned.
This chapter draws from the Guidelines for Accessible Assessment Project (GAAP), a federally funded research project to create and evaluate guidelines for developing American Sign Language versions of standardized test items. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of national education policy that provides the context for GAAP and the need for evidence-based guidelines, followed by an overview of the project. The third section describes lessons learned regarding fostering effective communication and collaboration among a deaf and hearing team. The fourth section describes important considerations for researchers related to sampling, recruitment, study design, data collection, analysis, and reporting. The chapter concludes with a summary of key learnings and critical questions that researchers should consider before embarking on research in deaf education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.