Accommodations for students with limited English proficiency in the National Assessment of Educational Progress

This study examines the effect and validity of accommodations for limited English proficiency (LEP) students in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the impact of language factors on the assessment and accommodation of these students. Results indicate that accommodations used in NAEP did not reduce the performance gap between LEP and non-LEP students. The results suggest that these accommodations did not affect the construct under measurement, thus including the accommodated results into the NAEP main assessment data seems reasonable. In addition, results suggest that the higher the level of linguistic complexity in a test item, the higher the performance gap between LEP and non-LEP students, regardless of the item's content difficulty. Thus, language-related accommodations may be more effective in reducing the performance gap between LEP and non-LEP students. However, because the main purpose of NAEP is assessment, not research, there are major limitations in the NAEP data for examining the effect and validity of accommodations. Thus, the findings of this study should be interpreted with caution.