Accommodations and Adaptations to the Assessment Accommodations and Adaptations to the Assessment
The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (1996) defines accommodations and adaptations as follows:
"Modifications in the way assessments are designed or administered so that students with disabilities and limited-English-proficient students can be included in the assessment. Assessment accommodations or adaptations might include Braille forms for blind students or tests in native languages for students whose primary language is other than English."
Such modifications may include changes to the setting, presentation, response mode, time, and scheduling of the assessment in order to accommodate the values and response characteristics of particular cultural groups and the needs of second-language learners. Examples of accommodations might include reading instructions to students and allowing oral responses if such modifications would not affect the interpretability of the results of the assessment. However, having a teacher read aloud a reading test to a student would invalidate the interpretation of the student's reading score.