The Effect of "Read-Aloud" as a Test Accommodation for Students with Visual Impairments in South Korea.

Students with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) have difficulty demonstrating their academic knowledge in standardized tests because of their limitations in accessing visual information. Therefore, in high-stakes tests, such as the SAT and the Graduate Records Examination, braille, large print, and the extension of time have been provided for them as basic and minimum accommodations, in consideration of their slower reading and writing speeds than students without disabilities. However, the barrier of vision loss for demonstrating what the students with visual impairments know may not be removed sufficiently with these accommodations (Sitlington, Clark, & Kolstoe, 2000). That is, because large print and braille are the basic literacy media for students with visual impairments, without these media the assessment of the reading comprehension or reading speed of those who are visually impaired may not be meaningful. The extension of time as a test accommodation for students with visual impairments can have an impact on students' reading performance. However, depending on the academic performance of each student, the level of difficulty of the reading materials, or the students' physical health (such as shoulder, back, or neck pain from an inappropriate posture while reading), the effects of an extension of time can be either positive or negative. Arguing the issue of fairness and the additional advantage for test takers with visual impairments, some professionals have expressed negative attitudes toward test accommodation (Sireci, Li, & Scarpati, 2003). However, researchers have found that the validity of test accommodations increases when the test scores of students who need a particular accommodation increases, while the scores of those who do not need it remain the same (Sitlington et al., 2000). The study presented here was conducted to examine the effects of read-aloud, the practice of providing a reader to read tests out loud as an accommodation for student with a disability. In this study, read-aloud was investigated in combination with commonly used accommodations for students with visual impairments like braille, large print, and extensions of time. The study was conducted as a pilot study before the investigation of the effects of read-aloud as a test accommodation on the academic achievement of students with visual impairments because of the paucity of previously conducted studies. METHOD Participants and settings The participants were 10 South Korean middle school students with visual impairments who were enrolled in a special school for students with visual impairments and a group of 10 Korean public school students without disabilities who were comparable in age and grade level in public schools. Two students in Grade 1, 4 in Grade 2, and 3 in Grade 3 were included in each group. Among the students with visual impairments, 3 had low vision and 7 were totally blind. The participants with visual impairments were familiar with commonly used accommodations, such as braille and large print, because as students in the special school, they always used these media. Also, they were familiar with time extension because unlimited time when taking tests is usual in special schools for students who are visually impaired. The tests for the students with visual impairments were administered in a classroom in their school, and the tests for the students without disabilities were administered in the conference room of a community church. The students without disabilities could not take the tests in their school because they did not attend the same school. Information on the participants and the settings is presented in Table 1. The variable for the study was the read-aloud accommodation. Therefore, to examine the effect of this variable, the test without read-aloud and the test with read-aloud were defined as Test Format 1 and Test Format 2, respectively. …