This year, NCEO is launching a new Enhanced Assessment Grant project titled “Data Informed Accessibility – Making Optimal Needs-based Decisions (DIAMOND).” The DIAMOND project is a collaboration between Minnesota, Alabama, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Virgin Islands, and the National Center on Educational Outcomes.

The project’s goal is to improve the validity of assessment results and interpretations for students with documented needs by developing guidelines for making informed decisions about accessibility features and accommodations. It will promote a decision-making process that moves beyond the use of a checklist approach (which often results in identifying tools and accommodations that do not provide access to the student), to an approach that relies on the use of classroom progress data and other measures charted over time to evaluate individual student needs.

All students who require accessibility and accommodations supports—general education students with documented accessibility needs, students with disabilities, English language learners (ELLs), ELLs with disabilities—will be served by this project.

The project will begin with conducting focus groups with educators to generate instructional and assessment strategies that inform the decision-making processes for accessibility features and accommodations. We will also collect data in schools in the member states to highlight appropriate practices in implementing accessibility features and accommodations. Another project activity will entail state-level assessment data analyses related to accessibility features and accommodations to showcase the process of making data informed decisions.

Once these research findings are collected and analyzed, we will hold a forum with national experts and state representatives to generate consensus on a set of guidelines and related comprehensive assessment instruments for making data-informed decisions about accessibility features and accommodations for students with documented needs. These guidelines will be included in a training module and supplemental materials and will be available for educators nationwide.

NCEO staff members are thrilled to be able to participate in this important study and collaborate with other external project partners on identifying effective guidelines for optimizing accessibility decision making for all students.