USBE clarifies allowable accommodations and alternate Acadience assessments for students with significant disabilities

Utah State Board of Education special education assessment staff reviewed allowable accommodations for Acadience reading and math and explained alternate-assessment procedures for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities during a training webinar.

Tracy Gulley, USBE special education assessment specialist, said accommodations must “reduce or eliminate the effect of that student's disability” without altering what the assessment measures. She reiterated that accommodations for testing must be determined by a student’s IEP, Section 504 plan or English-language team and that some common classroom accommodations are treated as universal resources within the Acadience system.

Key restrictions: Gulley and colleagues said two accommodations commonly requested for Acadience reading—read aloud and extended time—are not allowable because Acadience reading probes measure decoding and rely on short, time-limited probes that would be invalidated by those changes. “So extending that time would not give us reliable data on how those students are progressing,” Gulley said.

Math guidance and nonverbal options: USBE staff said read-aloud is allowable on Acadience concepts and applications items but not on computation items, where the assessment targets a student’s ability to compute. The agency noted a nonverbal AcadienceMath-aligned measure is being developed for pilot this year and that braille is available for students with visual impairments.

Alternate assessments and reporting: For students who meet strict alternate-assessment participation criteria, USBE provides early literacy and early mathematics alternate-assessment rubrics that teachers download from the USBE special education assessment webpage. Those rubrics are scored by teachers and reported back through the district’s Student Information System (SIS); alternate-assessment results are not entered in the Acadience/ALO system. Gulley emphasized that a student’s IEP team must determine alternate-assessment participation and that districts must mark the 1% alternate flag in SIS so USBE can account for participation.

Resources and training: Staff referenced an accommodations and alternate-assessment document that lists allowable resources, accommodations and nonallowable practices for Acadience reading and math and pointed to a Canvas course and guides available from USBE to walk teachers through scoring and reporting the alternate rubrics.

Next steps: USBE staff encouraged assessment directors and special-education teams to consult the accommodations document and to contact USBE assessment specialists for case-specific questions about assessing students with sensory or communication needs.