I have been searching for articles concerning visual disability and testing in a higher education. Very little seems to be available (even my librarian could only find one) about:
- time to study,
- typical requirements of extra time (I'm assuming as a function of type of exam since MC, essay, concept maps, etc all have very different demands)
- scoring variables that may or may not be biased.
Because disabled students are in the minority, they can be handled
on an individual basis. Caring and compassion are the watchwords.
Terms and conditions are flexible, and can most usefully be guided
by a Disabled Students' Program if you have the economy of scale
for one.
Because of timetabling problems, time to study has usually
been constrained to fall in the usual terms.
Time to write is usually time-and-a-half up to double time,
with the exam venue being away from the exam hall so that the
student is not disturbed by the other students leaving the hall.
The extra time does not depend on the type of examination set (or even the type of disability of the student concerned)..
The fact the student is disabled is not known to the examiners, as
the students are only identified by student numbers, not names.
For reliability and validity issues in testing students with visual impairments, you might take a look at these articles (both have a K-12 focus).
Geisinger, K. F. (1994). Psychometric issues in testing students with disabilities. Applied Measurement in Education, 7(2), 121–140.
and
Hannan, C. K. (2007). Exploring assessment processes in specialized schools for students who are visually impaired. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 101(2), 69–80.
If you are considering appropriate accommodations for a particular student in a higher education setting, this should be on an individualized bases, based on what the student has discussed with the university's disabilities services office. There is no set of accommodations that would apply to every student, but the student should be able to describe what he/she needs, and the disability services office can help you if you feel that the student's request is unreasonable or would impact your ability to evaluate the student's knowledge/skills.
Do the obvious thing, and send "visual disability and testing in higher education" to scholar.google.com
Ian, I did check google scholar, Eric, Psych abstracts, etc. I've worked with a professional librarian. I've even contacted the Association for the Blind and Visually Disabled. In recent years, their journal has had a couple of articles that are useful, though not with higher education students.
There are surprisingly few scholarly articles that provide data. And yes I agree there are lots of common sense things that can be done, at least in some cases. But there are several issues with such a common sense approach. First, there are unknown consequences of altering test rules for some students. Does it matter which text to speech system a student uses and how does that compare to students who use vision? Probably not much with essay tests, but I suspect matching would be a much bigger issue. Second, I am interested in mainstreaming students with disabilities, so I am looking at non-traditional test types that may not require extra time or other accommodations. I haven't found any research on non-traditional tests and visual disability.
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