Computer‐adaptive Testing for Students With Disabilities: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

There has been an increased interest in developing computer-adaptive testing (CAT) and multistage assessments for K-12 accountability assessments. The move to adaptive testing has been met with some resistance by those in the field of special education who express concern about routing of students with divergent profiles (e.g., some students with math-based learning disabilities may have difficulty with basic computation but not high level problem solving) and poor performance on early test questions. This paper consists of a literature review focusing on adaptive testing issues for students with disabilities in the K-12 sector. While it is clear that there are issues that will present obstacles to administering accountability tests adaptively to students with disabilities, this synthesis of research and policy developments with respect to this topic will be useful both for development of research agendas and to inform states that are currently using or are considering moving to CAT.Keywords: accountability, computer-adaptive testing, CAT, disabilities, K-12ii to evaluate student proficiency and identify achievement deficits (primarily at the sub-group, school, and district levels) via approved assessments aligned with specific content-based standards. Policies related to the use of standardized testing for accountability have been criticized, particularly in the context of evaluating the proficiency of students with disabilities.Often, the criticisms have focused on exclusion of students with disabilities from state testing and the inappropriate difficulty level of the general test for some students. Students with disabilities typically have individualized education programs (IEPs) that describe under what specific conditions a particular student will be assessed. These conditions may involve accommodations on the general test form or administration of an alternate assessment of below- It has been argued that many state tests do not appropriately measure the proficiency of students with disabilities. Achievement gaps between these and other students would correspondingly be misrepresented as well. These arguments can be summarized as follows:First, state tests are not often deliberately assembled in accordance with principles of universal design (Johnstone, Altman, & Thurlow, 2006) that incorporate accessibility into the test development process from the start. Although improvements have been made in this area, it remains the case that tests are most often made accessible to students with disabilities retrospectively, through the use of accommodations that may affect measurement of the construct and alter the meaning of resulting test scores. Second, a significantly higher proportion of students with learning disabilities fall into the lower tail of the proficiency distribution.Because state tests are usually designed to provide the most accurate measurement in the midrange of the ability scale, where the bulk of students are located, students with proficiencies on the low end of the scale may have no a...

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