Accommodations for Students With Special NeedsThe National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has always endeavored to assess all students selected as a part of its sampling process, including students who are classified by their schools as students with disabilities (SD) and/or as English-language learners (ELL) or limited English proficient (LEP). The decision to exclude any of these students is made by school staff, who, using NAEP guidelines and each student's Individualized Education Program (IEP), decide whether the student can meaningfully be assessed. A student with a disability was included in the NAEP assessment except in the following cases:
See more information about the history of the NAEP inclusion policy, rates of specific accommodations, and exclusion rates.
All LEP students who had received academic instruction in English for three years or more, including the current year, were to be included in 2000 or 2001 assessments if selected. Those LEP students who had received instruction in English for fewer than three years were to be included, if selected, unless school staff judged them to be incapable of participating in the assessment in English. All special-needs students could use the same accommodations in NAEP assessments that they used in their usual classroom testing unless the accommodation would make it impossible to measure the ability, skill, or proficiency being assessed, or the accommodation was not possible for the NAEP program to administer. For instance, in the reading assessment, reading the passage and questions aloud to a student was not permitted, because the NAEP assessment was intended to measure the student's ability to decode the written word as well as understand the meaning of the passage. Also, extending testing over several days was not allowed for NAEP, because NAEP administrators were in each school only one day. Last updated 07 August 2008 (RF) |
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