ABSTRACT
Even as tests may be developed and accommodated to specifically address the needs of English language learners (ELLs), if there is no technically rigorous mechanism in place to get the specific methods to the specific students who need them, it is argued that these efforts have little effect. Several researchers who investigate accommodation effectiveness for ELLs and students with disabilities point out that consistent and appropriate accommodations decision-making is critical to the validity of standardized academic testing programs and the ability to properly use scores to compare student performance across states and districts (e.g., Kopriva et al., 2006a; Fuchs et al., 2000a; Kopriva, 2000; Hollenbeck et al., 1998). At the individual level when accommodations decisions are not appropriate to meet the needs of individual students, test results misrepresent their knowledge and skills (Hipolito-Delgado and Kopriva, 2006). At the aggregate level, when accommodations decisions are inconsistent from classroom to classroom or district to district, comparisons across classrooms and districts may be unfair and meaningless (Abedi, 2006a; Solomon et al., 2001; Fuchs et al., 2000).
