TITLE:
Accommodations on Reading Comprehension Assessment for Students with Learning Disabilities: A Review Study
AUTHORS:
Georgia Andreou, Panagiota Athanasiadou, Sotiria Tzivinikou
KEYWORDS:
Learning Disabilities, Assessment, Reading Comprehension, Test Accommodations Interaction Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.10 No.4,
March
15,
2019
ABSTRACT: Students with learning disabilities face severe difficulties in a number of academic domains, such as phonological awareness, oral or written speech comprehension, time management, processing of information and organization of strategies to solve academic problems. This group of students constitutes a large category and even if they receive differentiated teaching, they fail to successfully perform in examinations. Therefore, the effectiveness of accommodations in the reading comprehension assessment of students with learning disabilities has been extensively studied the last ten years. Researchers verify the efficiency of the most frequently implemented accommodations—the administration of extended time and the read-aloud accommodation—and investigate new accommodations that aim at accurately depicting the performance of students with learning disabilities. To ensure assessment fairness and validity of accommodated tests, it has been proposed under the principles of interaction theory that these accommodations should not lead to changes in typical students’ performance. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of recent research in the field of accommodations on reading comprehension assessment, discuss their effectiveness in the context of the interaction theory and provide support for the significance of test accommodations for students with learning disabilities. The effectiveness of extended time and read aloud accommodations is confirmed by the results of the researches; however it is concluded that further investigation on additional accommodations is essential, so that different needs and difficulties be accommodated appropriately.