Testing Accommodations for Students With Disabilities: Research-Based Practice (Applying Psychology in the Schools Series)

I am a mom, not a teacher or a professional psychologist/counselor/psychiatrist, but this book has helped me to ask for certain accommodations for my daughter in her 504 plan at school. This book was easy to read and I hope many school employees will read it in order to help their 504/IEP students.

great book!

As a former director of documentation review for the College Board, I wish that this book had been available a decade ago. The questions the book raises, and the insights it provides were long over due then, and remain at least as important and relevant now. Testing Accommodations for Students With Disabilities: Research-Based Practice provides current and necessary information in a thorough and objective way. As a practicing psychologist, this book begins the process of making the granting of accommodations a valid, limited, effective intervention for only those who would otherwise be unnecessarily limited by their own profile of strengths and weaknesses.Testing Accommodations for Students With Disabilities: Research-Based Practice is a comprehensive review of the policy and legal requirements, established patterns, assumptions and practice of granting accommodations. As such, it is the best single source of information for anyone involved in the provision of accommodations.Lovett and Lewandowski cite the relative agreement as to a reasonable and appropriate accommodation for a sensory or orthopedically challenged person. The difficulty with accommodations for students with learning and psychiatric disabilities is, at least in part, due to the unresolved questions as to what are the core deficits that characterize and delimit these disorders. It appears that there will always be some disagreement as to appropriate accommodations without some agreed-upon description of core deficits. Some deficits are developmental, and, with effective intervention, are sufficiently modified or remediated. Other core deficits are permanent but present differently over the developmental continuum. Testing Accommodations for Students With Disabilities: Research-Based Practice can initiate a dialogue about core deficits (the subtle, narrow deficits that keep some students from achieving to their full potential). The book also opens the discussion of misapplied and over-applied accommodations, a major contribution.Practitioners (psychologists, administrators, teachers, ancillary support staff and consultants) may not see themselves as part of the escoterica of research. This book presents research in a readily understandable way, and is essential to inform practitioners’ daily professional activities as they serve students operating along a very wide range of skills and abilities. Lovett and Lewandowski describe the results of research in a way that practitioners can inform their daily service (teaching, testing, assessing, remediating) with students. The ultimate goal is to design an instructional program, including accommodations, that maximizes the ultimate success of students. They offer a novel notion that accommodations are best when they are part of instruction. An accommodation that does not address the core deficits, or that gives the student an undeserved advantage on tests, does not truly address the needs of students. Lovett and Lewandowski provide answers in this regard where possible, and raise questions to be answered.The editorial reviews offered above on this book attest to the considerable value and potential contribution of this highly informative text. I would add that the book is also the best source of insights that can be applied in day-to-day practice. The book can be a catalyst for anyone involved in the long series of steps in the process of educating unique students, starting with the investigation of the strengths and weaknesses of an individual student, through to the final stage of the student succeeding at the highest educational level possible. The book provides an alternative to the dogma of unquestioned practice. Practitioners can (as a result of having read Testing Accommodations for Students With Disabilities: Research-Based Practice and having it on hand), potentially, innovate in their routine duties and activities.Lovett and Lewandowski repeatedly use the term "universal design." Universal design rests upon the premise that the accomplishment of any task can be facilitated by modification of the environment in ways that benefit all students. The key here appears to be the integration of accommodations into instruction, and increased use of technology in instruction. The idea of universal design may be reasonably served by introducing the discussion of the optimal environment for learning into an ongoing discussion with teachers, teacher training and teacher organizations.Again, Testing Accommodations for Students With Disabilities: Research-Based Practice is, at this point in time, the primary resource available to inform these activities. If there are specific, narrow, applied-in-single-case accommodations, they may be provided once unmodifiable core deficits are objectively identified.