Test Options for Students with Special Educational Needs in Large Scale Assessments

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katharina Müller
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2013 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240402291

Purpose of the research stay at the University of Michigan is to examine, which kind of testing procedure is ideally suited to examine competencies from students with (special) educational needs in large scale assessments. Focus of interest are test accommodations which are designed and investigated extensively in the United States of America. These assessment options are utilized in us-American large scale assessment for the competence measurement of students with disabilities, students with educational needs, students with special needs and students at risk. Accommodations are changes in regular assessments in the kind of presentation, response, timing/scheduling or setting. The aim is to enable students with special educational needs to avoid the barriers that their disabilities create. Construct relevant characteristics such as difficulty are not modified to prevent influences on the validity. Within national and international large scale assessments in Germany test accommodations in timing and scheduling are applied by preference. They are used exclusively for students with special educational needs if they are diagnosed as students with disabilities. More elaborated test accommodations (e.g. reading aloud test items or instructions) are not implemented yet. Furthermore, low performing students, the so called students at risk, do not get test accommodations taking their special educational needs into account.The scholarship is applied to review the considerable amount of us-American findings concerning test accommodations for students with educational needs, students with special needs and students at risk. Regarding the German accountability system, the leading question is which criteria must be taken into account to design valid test instruments for students with different kinds of educational needs. The three-monthly work program at the University of Michigan is separated into the following three steps:1. Reviewing the considerable findings concerning test accommodations.2. Embedding the us-American findings in a German supplementary study to PISA 2012 that examines the validity of different accommodations.3. Developing a collaborative research project between the University of Michigan and the Technische Universität München on comparative issues regarding test accommodations in large scale assessments in the USA and in Germany.The findings are summarized in a review and published in an international journal. Furthermore, they are used for the international embedding of existing findings and represent a basis for a planned study that explores differential effects of so called read aloud accommodations.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Institution: Michigan State University ; Department of Psychology
• Host: Professor Dr. Kai Schnabel Cortina