Evaluation of a Condition‐adaptive Test of Reading Comprehension for Students With Reading‐based Learning Disabilities

Abstract

This study presents secondary analyses on a 2–stage test of reading comprehension for students with reading‐based learning disabilities (RLD). The present paper describes student perceptions of the test and its features as well as analyses focused on the routing test and associated cut score. The routing test contained typical state assessment content and was designed to route the RLD participants into 1 of 2 accessible 2nd‐stage tests, 1 accommodated and 1 not accommodated, and we refer to this structure as condition‐adaptive. The accommodated test was presented with a read‐aloud accommodation, and an oral reading fluency subtest was also administered as part of that test to evaluate decoding skill that may have been masked by the read‐aloud accommodation. This design allowed for componentwise measurement of reading proficiency at the 2nd stage with the goal of creating an accessible tailored test that would provide more comparable accommodated and nonaccommodated test scores for possible use for accountability. Overall, student perceptions differed depending on which 2nd‐stage test was taken, but most students indicated that they tried as hard on this field test as they did on other tests, and many expressed a preference for the read‐aloud accommodation. We found that routing test length was more strongly correlated with 2nd‐stage test performance for the higher performing RLD students, that relatively similar routing decisions could be made using a shorter routing test made up of a smaller subset of the available passages, and that the percentage of students routed into each 2nd‐stage test was sensitive to perturbations of the cut score.

Advancing Human Assessment: A Synthesis Over Seven Decades

“…For those with disabilities, topics included accessibility (Hansen et al 2012;Stone et al 2016), accommodations (Cook et al 2010), instrument and item functioning (Buzick and Stone 2011;Steinberg et al 2011), computer-adaptive testing (Stone et al 2013;Stone and Davey 2011), automated versus human essay scoring , and the measurement of growth (Buzick and Laitusis 2010a, b). For English learners, topics covered accessibility Young et al 2014), accommodations (Wolf et al 2012a, b), instrument functioning (Gu et al 2015;Young et al 2010), test use (Lopez et al 2016;Wolf and Farnsworth 2014;Wolf and FaulknerBond 2016), and the conceptualization of English learner proficiency assessment systems ).…”