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5 4 Use of Technology Neal Kingston and and Principles Michael Ehringhaus of Universal Design to Improve the Validity and Fairness of Licensure Tests Je ne parle pas français. J’ai étudié le français pendant trois années dans le lycée, mais en dépit de mes parents employant un précepteur privé pour travailler avec moi je l’ai trouvé une grande lutte et ai presque échoué. En fait, la seule raison que j’ai passée est parce que la section d’écoute de compréhension—en valeur 40 pour cent de l’essai— n’a pas été normalisée. Oui, chacun a pris les mêmes questions (c’était un examen de Regents d’état de New York, ainsi chaque étudiant III français dans l’état a pris le même essai), mais c’était à un moment où non toutes les écoles ont eu des joueurs de bande (et avant le joueur omniprésent de cassette) et ainsi mon professeur de salle de classe a lu un manuscrit. Perhaps, like me, you do not speak French. Let me start again in English. I do not speak French. I studied French for three years in high school, but despite my parents hiring a private tutor to work with me, I found it a great struggle and almost failed. In fact, the only reason I passed is because the oral comprehension section—worth 40% of the test—was not standardized. Yes, everyone took the same questions (this was a New York State Regents Examination, so every French III student in the state took the same test), but this was at a time when not all schools had tape players (and before the ubiquitous cassette player), so the classroom teacher read a script. Being unable to comprehend spoken French, I paid no attention to the content of my teacher’s words. Bored, and with little else to do during the test, I paid attention to the intonation and stress she placed on the words. I noticed in reading the questions, she stressed slightly one of the four answer choices; my French was sufficient to recognize the French version of the letters A, B, C, and D. Having no better chance to pass the test, and having been told that without three years of a foreign language I would not get into a college and would be drafted, go to Vietnam, and die (there have always been many forms of high-stakes testing), I chose whichever answer her voice stressed. Everyone else in the class was busy listening to the content of the script and did not notice the slight stresses in her speech. When the tests were scored, I had answered 19 of the 20 questions in this section correctly—the highest score in the school—rather The authors wish to thank Edmund Ashley, David Martin, and Judy Mounty for their thought-provoking comments on two earlier drafts of this chapter. The most rewarding writing is writing from which the author learns, and this has been such an experience. Use of Technology 55 than the 6 or 7 out of 20 that would have been my more typical score. So for the want of a standardized test, I passed French, graduated from high school, graduated from college, went to graduate school, earned a doctorate, and became a psychometrician. Perhaps if I had learned French from birth, I would have done better; perhaps I have a learning disability that makes it harder for me to learn French than most people. On the other hand, I am a good psychometrician (though perhaps not an overly modest one), but if I had to take a psychometrician licensure examination in French, I would fail. INTRODUCTION Trybus and Karchmer (1977) reported the median reading comprehension score of deaf students age 20+ participating in the norming of the Special Edition of the Stanford Achievement Test for Hearing Impaired Students to be at grade level 4.5. Based on the same standardization sample, the median mathematics grade level was below 8.0. Willingham, Ragosta, et al. (1988) reported the mean Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Verbal score of deaf or hard of hearing students as 291—1.2 standard deviations below the mean score of the group of all college-bound students. This mean score is .5 standard deviations below the mean score of self-reported learning-disabled students and 1.0 standard deviation below the mean score of visually-impaired students. The mean...

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