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High Stakes Testing Essay

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Testing students with disabilities or special needs can be difficult. High-stakes testing causes the biggest issue for these students. Students with disabilities are provided services based on their needs as required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (Lee, n.d.). Accommodations, which are changes in the administration of the test, are sometimes provided as services to students with disabilities to level the playing field between them and their nondisabled peers (Gilbertson Schulte, Elliott, & Kratochwill, 2000). Students with disabilities are held to high standards by education reform efforts (Gilbertson et al., 2000). Test accommodations are meant to help students with disabilities meet these high standards. Accommodations …show more content…

Meek argues that the tests are too in depth for students with disabilities to be able to comprehend, and they take way too long for special needs students to complete, therefore most of the students give up and mark random answers, even with their testing accommodations (Meek, 2006). To improve their performance, Meek proposes to allow students with disabilities to take tests out of their grade level, and more in line with their cognitive abilities (Meek, 2006). The teacher also recommends giving only parts of the test to the student (Meek, 2006). For example, if a student can perform adequately in math with his/her accommodations, but cannot perform well in ELA, even with the accommodations, maybe only giving the math portion of the exam would suffice. In this case, Meek proposes using other means to assess the student’s ELA progress.
Personally, I agree with Meek’s suggestions. The suggestion I agree with most is to test special needs students out of their grade level and at their cognitive level. If we want these students to perform well on standardized tests, we need to provide tests that they have the skills and knowledge to take. All the suggestions proposed by Meek could reduce the stress associated with high-stakes testing for special needs students and would probably raise test scores for this population of

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