Ensuring Equity Through Student Testing Accommodations

Testing accommodations and student equity are two sides of the same coin, and in today’s ever-changing educational landscape, ensuring that each student receives proper test accommodations has become more challenging than ever.  

To get a feel for how educators are tackling this issue, Lara Miller and CarieBarthelemess, Account Executives for TestHound, talked about the topic during a recent Education Advanced webinar. Joining them were two testing specialists, Gail Long, Coordinator of Accountability and Assessment at Hurst Euless Bedford ISD and Carla Schaefer, Director of Assessment and Accountability at Victoria ISD.  

A lively and informative conversation ensued about how Long and Schaefer ensure proper test accommodations for the students in their districts and the role that TestHound plays in the success of those testing programs.

How Do You Ensure Proper Test Accommodations?

Carla Schaefer: As a teacher, of course, your job is to make sure that you understand the accommodations, and that the accommodations that you select mirror the support that you're providing in the classroom.  

As a Director, it's a very different job. I don't sit in any meetings. I don't make any of the decisions about accommodations for the students, but it is my responsibility to make sure that everyone understands the accommodations and how they apply in the testing world.  

Gail Long: I think the big thing for us, sometimes, is making sure the teachers in the classroom know that a student can have a classroom accommodation that doesn't necessarily transfer over to having a testing accommodation.  

So, it's kind of been a teaching point. Yes, you want to use it [the accommodation] in the classroom, because it's a teaching point for those students to guide and help them. On the other hand, it’s making sure that they know that just because they can use it in the classroom doesn't mean they get it on a test.

What Are Some of the Difficulties of Transferring to Online Testing?

Carla Schaefer: We were not an online testing district last year, so we have a lot of cleaning up to do because we have a lot of old accommodations that were paper-based.  

In TestHound, I can actually download those files so that I can find students that still have old accommodations, and I can reach out to the campuses to let them know. Hey! You have old accommodations.  

Otherwise, the student is not eligible for that accommodation, because the student’s not taking a paper test. That's been very, very helpful to us.

How Do You Deal With Testing Irregularities?

Lara Miller: Let's say testing happened, and we're trying to make sure, post testing, that everybody is good to go. Do you have any processes when it comes to accommodations, or just verifying that things did go the way they were supposed to? A big irregularity, sometimes, is an accommodation irregularity. How have you worked to prevent those irregularities from happening?

Carla Schaefer: We make sure that the coordinators run the master accommodation reports, and we have them do them separately by program. They run a 504 report, and give it to their campus 504 coordinator to check.

We usually try to have that done at least two weeks prior to testing, so that someone who should be in the know can sign off to make sure that those are correct. They print those reports out and give them to those people. They mark them all up. They go back to meetings. They reprint the reports until they get it all cleaned up.

CarieBarthelemess: A lot of times the irregularities that we had came from last-minute decisions. Is that something that you all deal with? Do you guys have deadlines? You did mention a two-week timeframe. Do you all have any magic advice on how to make sure that those last-minute ones don't cause an irregularity?

Gail Long: We're pretty strict on that. We're not going to go and do something that's not going to be best for the student. But we're also going to make sure that our people are following those timelines as best we can.  

Carla Schaefer: Absolutely. Again, I think the most important thing, especially if you are speaking to coordinators, is that you don't hope that those things will be corrected. You need to stay on top of it. You can't wait until ten days before testing. You need to be working with your program coordinators way before that.  

In essence, it all boils down to communication. You don't assume anything. If things aren't getting done, then you need to be reaching out to the right people to make sure that they do get it done.

To learn more about how your schools can adjust to their students' needs during testing, schedule a risk-free demonstration of TestHound.  

If your school is interested in new ways to improve the learning experience for children, you may also be interested in automating tasks and streamlining processes so that your teachers have more time to teach. Education Advanced offers a suite of tools that may be able to help. For example, four of our most popular and effective tools are:

• Cardonex, our master schedule software, helps schools save time on building master schedules. Many schools used to spend weeks using whiteboards to organize the right students, teachers, and classrooms in the right order so students could graduate on time and get their preferred classes. However, it can now be used to automate this task and, within a couple of days, deliver 90% of students' first-choice classes.
• Evaluation is a solution for documenting every step of the staff evaluation process, including walk-throughs, self-evaluations, supporting evidence, reporting and performance analytics.
• Pathways is a graduation tracking tool that allows administrators and counselors to create, track, and analyze graduation pathways to ensure secondary students are on track to graduate.
• Testhound, our test accommodation software, helps schools coordinate thousands of students across all state and local K-12 school assessments while taking into account dozens of accommodations (reading disabilities, physical disabilities, translations, etc.) for students.