Equity, Fairness, and Accommodating the Needs of Diverse Learner

Equity, Fairness and Accommodating the Needs of Diverse Learners

By Timothy Comer

Each of the following scenarios introduces a student with a disability and identifies his or her related challenge. For each student, the teacher implements several types of supports. Determine whether each support is an accommodation, modification, or strategy/intervention.
https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/acc/cresource/q1/p02/#content

Multiple Choice

Danica, a student with a learning disability (LD), struggles with writing. Her teacher assigns the following class project: research a planet using a minimum of three sources and then write a five-paragraph essay about that planet. Because Danica produces few complete sentences and ideas when given a writing task, her teacher implements several types of support to help her complete the assignment.

The teacher reminds Danica to use TREE (Topic sentence, Reason, Explanation, Ending), a mnemonic device students can use to organize their ideas.

• Accommodation

• Modification

• Strategy/

  Intervention

Multiple Choice

Brody, a 6th-grade student with ADHD, has difficulty organizing his time. His social studies teacher assigns a long-term project that involves researching the history of their town. The assignment includes the following requirements: visit the local library to complete a demographic information sheet, interview three people who have lived in the town since childhood, and create a presentation using that information. Because the teacher knows that Brody has difficulty completing long-term assignments by the due date, she implements several types of support to help him to do so.

The teacher breaks the assignment into smaller pieces or “chunks” the materials (e.g., week 1—visit the local library to complete demographic information sheet; weeks 2 and 3— interview three people who have lived in the town since childhood).

• Accommodation

• Modification

• Strategy/

  Intervention

Multiple Choice

Aliyah, a middle school student with muscular dystrophy, often experiences physical fatigue. She is a highly motivated student and excels academically. Her language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies teachers typically assign homework that requires access to textbooks. Because her teachers realize that carrying heavy textbooks home each night is difficult for Aliyah, they implement several types of support to help her complete her assignments.

The teachers assign a different assignment that does not require the textbooks.

• Accommodation

• Modification

• Strategy/

  Intervention

skills needed to complete the assessment, although they are not specifically being measured

Access skills

knowledge or skills being assessed (e.g., mathematics computation, reading comprehension)

Target Skills

Being able to differentiate between target skills and access skills is critical for determining the types of testing accommodations that will allow a student the opportunity to demonstrate his or her knowledge and skills.

Multiple Choice

Danica, a student with LD, struggles with organizing ideas and providing supporting details in writing assignments. To assess the class at the end of the unit on the solar system, her science teacher gives an exam consisting of five essay questions.

Danica's knowledge of the solar system is an example of

• Target Skill

• Access Skill

Multiple Choice

Brody, a 6th-grade student with ADHD, has difficulty organizing his time. His social studies teacher is giving a chapter test on important battles of World War I and will allow the students 30 minutes to complete it.

An example of an access skill would be

• Knowledge of World War I

• Time-Management

Multiple Select

Ahmed, a high school student with an intellectual disability, reads at a 2nd-grade level. The standardized assessment he will take in the spring will require him to read passages and identify key information.

Examples of access skills include (select all that apply)

• decoding

• fluency

• comprehension

• identifying key information

The table summarizes the relationship between barriers related to learning and the corresponding accommodation categories, and it also provides examples of accommodations for each category.

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Types of Accommodations

Multiple Choice

Rae has difficulty identifying the main point of assessment questions when faced with long word problems. For this reason, any time her teacher uses a gives her a quiz/test using word problems, she highlights the text that represents the question/task (i.e., a visual cue) on Rae’s copy.

This type of accommodation would best be classified as

• Presentation

• Response

• Setting

• Timing and scheduling

Multiple Choice

In addition to having difficulty identifying and remembering important information, Kaeden processes information more slowly than his peers. For this reason, his teacher gives her extended time to take tests. This allows Kaeden to process what the questions are asking and formulate responses.

• Presentation

• Response

• Setting

• Timing and scheduling

Multiple Choice

Cierra, is highly sensitive to noise. The teacher gives her a set of noise-reducing headphones during an assessment to help her focus on her work.

• Presentation

• Response

• Setting

• Timing and scheduling

Multiple Choice

When Rae is assigned to write a research paper, she struggles to organize her main ideas and structure her thoughts. As a result, her papers contain a lot of loosely connected facts arranged in a disorganized manner. The teacher addresses these barriers by providing Rae with a template for writing a research paper.

• Presentation

• Response

• Setting

• Timing and scheduling