Designing Inclusive K-12 Assessments

Five Tips to Help You Plan for Accessibility

As an optimist and a planner, I’m a big fan of New Year’s. This new year, as I join the Center for Assessment team, I’m full of plans. High on my list—and not a surprise to anyone who knows my work— is how to create more inclusive assessments for students with disabilities. In this post, I’ll focus on an important but too often neglected strategy: planning for accessibility.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” It’s particularly true when it comes to building assessments that are inclusive of students with disabilities. No one wants to be excluded from the group, and yet standardized testing has a unique way of making too many students feel they don’t belong.

This can happen when students who need extra time are sent to a different test location from their classmates. It can also happen when a teacher reads aloud, calling attention to a student’s struggle with decoding in a way that another approach, such as using earbuds and a screen reader wouldn’t have done. These are examples of accessibility failures that start with the failure to plan.

The first sign of a pending accessibility failure is when F.A.I.L. is first uttered at a design meeting. My heart always sinks when I hear it: “Can’t we just Fix Accessibility Issues Later?” While it is never too late to fix problems with accessibility, a F.A.I.L. means stigmatization, exclusion, or lack of access in the short term. It can also mean a lot more time, money, and effort in the long term.

As I work with states and districts, I want to help them avoid this problem by planning for accessibility from the start. Here are my top five tips for avoiding the F.A.I.L. approach:

Clearly State That Accessibility Is a Priority

Many might assume this is standard practice, but it isn’t. It’s important to state, in initial project planning and design meetings, that accessibility is a top priority.

This can take the form of creating common “success criteria” that describe how students who use assistive technologies will be included in a digital testing platform. State departments of education can highlight these criteria in requests for proposals, and school districts can emphasize accessibility in their contracts.

If you are on the test design team, you can use the Evidence-Centered Design process to clearly define the population of test takers as inclusive of people with disabilities. Those who are developing learning standards can ensure that construct definitions—what the test aims to measure—are inclusive. And they can reflect on whether their English language arts standards are defined broadly enough to be inclusive of different ways of “listening,” such as interpreting American Sign Language or reading closed captions.

Eliminate Ableist Thinking (and Language)

This is something most of us, including me, are still working on. Many people have been raised in cultures that assign high values to competition, extroversion, and independence. The special education community also places a high value on an asset-based mindset and collectivism, in which everyone contributes their unique gifts and the sum of all our talents is greater than any individual’s talent.

This may mean recognizing that some people need time to think before forming an opinion, and some who use screen readers to read text may need documents shared prior to a meeting. Anti-ableist thinking and using asset-based language in our everyday lives can help us see that many “disabilities” are not shortcomings in individual people, but byproducts of how we design our products and environments.

Expand Your Team and Professional Network

One common reason for the F.A.I.L. approach is that the project team didn’t understand how even small design decisions can impact accessibility. This usually stems from working in an insular network or silo that operates with little or no input about accessible solutions. It’s a place ableist beliefs can flourish.

While including at least one team member with accessibility knowledge can make a big impact, it isn’t possible for a single person to represent the entire disability community. A better approach is for every team member to have a network of people they can consult with in their unique area of expertise.

If you work for a state department of education, you can expand your network by adding someone with deep expertise in accessible assessments to your state Technical Advisory Committee, or join the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Assessment, Standards, and Education for Students with Disabilities (ASES) state collaborative. If you’re into AI scoring, psychometrics or assessment research, you can join a special interest group (SIG), such as the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGACCESS, or the American Educational Research Association’s Inclusion and Accessibility in Education Assessment SIG 96.

Share Power with the Disability Community

While experts may be able to create isolated accessibility success stories, the best way to ensure success at scale is through shared power, transparency, and iterative feedback from communities who will most acutely feel the impact of tests that aren’t accessible.

On K-12 educational assessments, this includes students with disabilities, their parents, and their educators. Various approaches can include people with disabilities, such as:

• Forming an advisory group of advocacy organizations in your state or school district
• Conducting an accessible student survey or cognitive lab to collect input before systems and test items are finalized
• Involving special education teachers in item development
• Conducting focus groups with parents of students with disabilities to inform the design of score reports 

Keep Learning About Test Accessibility

Over the last few years, our digital literacy skills have skyrocketed because of the need to learn, shop, and work online. We hold meetings on Zoom, share documents on the cloud, and co-create and collaborate across time zones. It is also important that everyone in K-12 education is knowledgeable about accessible technology tools and how to create accessible documents.

Not everyone needs to be an expert, but all of us should be asking for a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, or VPAT, when making purchasing decisions. We should know the differences between ADA, IDEA, 504, and 508. If you are a little fuzzy on that last sentence, it probably means you are missing some key background knowledge that will make it difficult for you to implement the tips in this post.

I’ve included a quick note below* to help you decode the shorthand in that sentence. But to start building a good background, you can visit the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, W3C Digital Accessibility Foundations, Office of Civil Rights Guidance on Testing Accommodations, and use the NCEO’s Accommodations Toolkit. They’ll help you stay up to date on research and state policy.

(I’ll be writing a lot more about accessibility, too, so subscribe to Center’s updates to receive those. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!)

*The Americans with Disabilities Act,the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act,Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. These are the main federal laws that protect people with disabilities from discrimination in many areas, including K-12 education.