ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon the experience and views of lecturing staff and disabled students of reasonable adjustments to assessment. It draws on successive interviews with 31 disabled students over the three-year period that students were undertaking their degree course. During the same period about 40 teaching sessions were observed and 50 of the staff who taught students in the longitudinal study were interviewed and asked specifically about issues arising for them and their institution in relation to reasonable adjustments and fair assessment. Interviews with the 31 students were informed by two surveys undertaken earlier at one of the participating universities. One survey consisted of questionnaire responses from 173 disabled students and four focus groups of 30 disabled students (Fuller, Bradley and Healey, 2004; Fuller et al., 2004) prior to the enactment of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA). The second survey involved a different sample of 548 disabled and non-disabled students (Fuller, Hurst and Bradley, 2004) at the beginning of the research project in 2004 when the implications for universities of SENDA were still being considered and before we began interviewing disabled students and their lecturers.
