Cooperation project with Dr. Rolf Strietholt, IEA (Principal investigator)

Financial supported by IEA Research and Development Fund

Aims

This project explores how countries manage accommodations for students with special education needs (SEN)—a diverse group including those with learning disabilities, physical impairments, and other SEN—in IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) studies. Despite IEA’s efforts in supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, students with SEN are often excluded from the assessments. This exclusion may occur partly because the assessments are not designed to be accessible for students with SEN. While accommodations like extended testing time and assistive technology are common in national assessments, their use in IEA studies has been limited and poorly documented. There is little to no information on how countries handle SEN, which accommodations are allowed by the IEA, and how these are implemented across countries.

The main goal of ADAPT is to better understand how SEN is defined across countries and across IEA studies, how students with SEN are included (or not) in these studies and what kind of accommodations are used to enable their participation. We seek to gather knowledge on how IEA studies could move to greater inclusivity by mapping current accommodation practices, as we believe that countries can learn from each other's approaches to achieve more inclusive assessments.

Research questions

1. How do NRCs define and categorize SEN?
2. Which identified SEN categories lead to student exclusion or inclusion, and how many students are impacted
3. What accommodations are provided to included students with SEN, and how do NRCs perceive the success of these measures?

Study design

The project will consist of two phases, combining information from various data sources. Phase 1 will focus on understanding and defining SEN across countries through a pilot survey directed at selected national research coordinators (NRCs) of the latest cycles of TIMSS, PIRLS, ICCS, and ICILS together with an analysis of the existing Sampling Forms from these studies. In addition, we will perform cross-checks against existing literature on the topic and recent work by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on accommodations in PISA. As a result, we will develop a comprehensive list of SEN categories across all participating countries, which will inform the next project phase.

In Phase 2, we will again survey NRCs to investigate the decision-making process for including/excluding students with different SEN, including the number of students included/excluded per SEN category, their mode of inclusion (i.e., with or without accommodations), and the specific accommodations used, along with any related challenges. Both phases will be supported by content experts from the TU Dortmund research cluster on Education Schooling and Inclusion. In the second phase we will use content analysis with MAXQDA.

Outcomes

The findings will provide a knowledge base to inform future technical standards and guidelines for accommodations for students with SEN in IEA studies. This research holds the potential to significantly impact educational policy and practice by promoting more inclusive assessments that accurately reflect the abilities of all students, including those with SEN.