Testing Students with Disabilities in Kentucky Schools

Students with disabilities are increasingly being included in large scale, high-stakes testing programs despite inadequate accommodations. In recent years, the school system has increased pressure on students in regards to testing. In the past, Kentucky has done a poor job of including impaired students in its statewide assessments; mainly in failing to provide the mandated accommodations for disabled students. In order to help these students with their learning skills, test scores, appropriate testing accommodations and the performance of students with disabilities. Results indicate that most Kentucky students have been included in the CATS assessment, but many the scores obtained from disabled students may not be reliable due to inappropriate accommodation.

What are Accommodations?

To allow for accurate assessment of disabled students, “accommodations are intended to provide fairer and more valid estimates of performance by removing disability related barriers to performance that are irrelevant to the construct the assessment is designed to measure” . Sadly, research on the effects of accommodations on impaired students is fairly scant; however, the amount of investigation into the subject is increasing as the importance of test scores rise.

“Tidal and his colleagues, for example, found that special education students perform better when a test was read to them than when they had to read it themselves.” While this observation seems to be something any competent teacher could discern, it is important for accommodations to simply level the playing field,—they are not meant to give impaired examinees an advantage—and as such, specific measurements must be taken. The Kentucky Department of Education collected and ana...

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...ildren into the mainstream classrooms, teachers are now expected to alter there lesson plans and teaching styles to accommodate differentiated instruction. For some teachers this change is seen as a positive experience to create a better environment and accommodate the individual needs of all of their students.”

The inclusion of disabled children into the general populace poses a new challenge to many teachers as they have not dealt with such children before. Furthermore, experience with impaired children may help teachers determine whether a struggling student is simply lazy or disabled. Schools should attempt obtain information about students’ strengths and weaknesses with the help of their parents and materials furnished by developmental experts. Such information would be vital to the identification, instruction and testing of children with special needs.