Accommodations

The purpose of testing accommodations is to provide students with disabilities an equal opportunity to demonstrate their language proficiency. The goal is keeping the test’s construct and scoring the same while accommodating the way the test is administered to test takers with special needs to ensure that all participants can meet the same skill challenges in the test. Accommodations can be made to testing conditions, such as providing extra time or individual testing, as well as test materials.

Accommodations Available in ELTiS

Some accommodation features, such as picture magnification and font size adjustment, are available to all test takers as part of the ELTiS interface. Two types of physical accommodated materials are also available. We have an Accommodated Materials Lending Library that you can use to borrow a physical Large Print Test Set or an uncontracted Braille Test Set. If you choose to use the Lending Library, you will receive a package with your selected materials on loan. Once you have administered the test, you return the borrowed materials to Ballard & Tighe. Your costs are limited to the shipping of the materials. If you fail to return the materials or if they are found unusable upon return, you will be invoiced the replacement cost for the materials. For more information about the Accommodated Materials Lending Library, please contact us.

Who can use the accommodated materials?

The application of testing accommodations requires documentation showing that their use is motivated. Typically, information provided by parents, teachers, special education specialists, and other relevant professionals can be taken into consideration when making these decisions. Accommodations that are allowed are typically those that the student uses routinely during their regular instructional program and classroom assessments. However, some of these accommodations may not be appropriate given the purpose of the ELTiS as a measure of the student’s proficiency in English. In particular, the content of the test items cannot be translated into the student’s native language, because the test assesses proficiency in the test language. The validity of text-to-speech and speech-to-text accommodations should also be considered carefully, and should only be considered for students who have no access to reading text or have severely impaired ability to respond otherwise. There is no published research on these accommodations for language testing purposes, and ELTiS has not been validated for this mode.

Permitted Accommodations

The list below provides information about accommodations that are appropriate to use with the ELTiS when testing students with disabilities when documentation for needing these supports exists.

Unvalidated Accommodations

For more information about the ELTiS for students with disabilities, please contact us.