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Historical Reflections Marjorie Ragosta on Testing Individuals Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing For many years, I was a staff member at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in New Jersey, where (among other pursuits) I was intimately involved with test development issues related to accommodations and fairness for test-takers who have disabilities. My prior experience with deaf or hard of hearing individuals was only in relation to adults who had acquired difficulty with their hearing but had grown up as native speakers of English and could read English with reasonable competence. Since 1939, the College Board has sought to provide special test administrations of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to students with disabilities in order to minimize the effects of the disabilities on their test performance. The first adaptations of the SAT were responses to efforts by blind people and their advocates for an accessible version of the test. The College Board developed a Braille version, and gave extra time to testtakers since it takes longer to read Braille. A large-type version of the SAT was not difficult to produce and could be used by many visually impaired test-takers. When blind veterans of World War II began returning to college, cassette versions of the SAT were developed for those who had no experience with Braille. Adaptations were made for veterans with physical disabilities—individual administrations of the test with extra time and perhaps an amanuensis to mark the answer sheet. As wounded war veterans expanded on what blind advocates had begun, special test administrations, although still relatively few, became less unusual. From the beginning, however, test scores from all special administrations were flagged to indicate that the scores were obtained under nonstandard conditions rather than the normal standardized testing requirements. Civil rights legislation made the next impact on the testing of individuals with disabilities . The 1977 regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 required that admissions tests for students with disabilities be validated to ensure that they measured the students’ aptitude and achievement rather than any disabilities extraneous to what was being measured. It also required that the test scores from special test administrations NOT be flagged. Because the regulations were seen by testing professionals as impossible to implement, the Office of Civil Rights held them in abeyance and asked the National Academy of Sciences to appoint a Panel on Testing of Handicapped People to study the issues. Their report, submitted in 1982, began a lengthy program of research at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), funded jointly by the College Board, the ETS, and the Graduate Record Examinations Board. But even before the panel’s report was issued, the College Board and the ETS had begun preparing for the possibility of validity studies. The first step was a small pilot study to interview students with disabilities in selected colleges and universities about 1 1 12 Marjorie Ragosta their experiences with college-entrance examinations. As a Research Scientist at ETS, I was asked to undertake this preliminary task before any further research was begun. I almost turned down the request. I had little experience nor expertise in the area of disabilities and frankly was afraid of being inadequate for the task. My prior experience with deaf and hard of hearing individuals was only in relation to adults who had acquired difficulty with hearing but who had grown up as native speakers of English. In retrospect , I now believe that this lack of knowledge and experience is fairly typical of many testing professionals and often creates, in and of itself, a handicapping condition for people with disabilities. Despite these misgivings, however, I agreed to do the interviews. I consulted with the individuals responsible for setting up special test administrations, which revealed that accommodations for the SAT primarily consisted of the use of alternative formats—Braille, large-type, or cassette tests—as well as additional testing time. Deaf or hard of hearing students were given written rather than oral instructions, a tap on the shoulder when time was up, and perhaps extra time. At that time, I did not question the appropriateness of these accommodations because they appeared to be reasonable. PILOT STUDY Individual interviews lasted about a half-hour and utilized a specially developed questionnaire . The 30-minute interviews occurred at sites with populations large enough to ensure that they could be conducted efficiently with a wide variety of students with disabilities . Although this study and subsequent research was conducted across many disability groups, for purposes...

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