Assessing Students With Disabilities: Issues and Evidence

DIF in Spanish and Mathematics from Costa Rica’s national tests in reported students with ADHD

“…It shows the need to triangulate the statistical-quantitative evidence with qualitative findings in order to generate empirical hypotheses that must be verified in future confirmatory and experimental studies. Koretz and Barton (2003) confirm that, despite the increase of students with disabilities in large-scale assessment, there is limited information regarding the use of test accommodations for students with disabilities, in both elementary and secondary levels.…”

“…The first one is based on the empirical evidence obtained in multiple studies, carried out particularly in the US, which have confirmed the contribution of accommodations to more adequately measure the performance of students in large scale testing (Koretz y Barton;2003;Sireci, Scarpati y Li, 2005). That research also holds the position assumed in this study, related to the purpose of accommodations as tools to achieve higher measurement accuracy for the morphology, syntactic and literary and mathematical knowledge of students in the focal group, eliminating or minimizing the effect of their condition or disability in their performance.…”

“…There are also studies regarding the effects of test accommodations in the tests' scores of students' with disabilities, (Thompson, Blount y Thurlow, 2002). Other research pertains to the effect of accommodations in the test's validity for students with disabilities (Koretz y Barton, 2003). In Costa Rica, this is the first DIF study carried out with the ADHD population in a national standardized test.…”

Leading Student Assessment

“…Many issues surround the processes and procedures for conducting formal testing, carrying out informal assessment, and providing accommodations to students with special needs (Allbritten et al 2004;Bowen and Rude 2006;DeLuca 2008;Koretz and Barton 2004;McLaughlin and Thurlow 2003). Some issues, like fairness in testing, apply to all of these topics while others are unique to specific types of assessment (Gilbertson and Ferre 2008;Perner 2007) such as testing deaf students.…”

Restrained Teaching: The Common Core of Didaktik

“…Within the realms of modern comparative assessment they can only count as liabilities or are simply excluded as non-fitting entities (cf. Koretz & Barton, 2003;Hörmann, 2007). To respect as valid other patterns of competency or meaning than those put into the test constructions would undermine the possibility of clear-cut results, and thereby the political and scientific reasons for having such assessments.…”