Students wtih Learning Disabilities in Texas (US) will have read-aloud and extra-time accommodations when they take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, according to Jennifer Radcliffe, writing in the Houston Chronicle.
Teachers will now read aloud all proper names — such as Mississippi, Constitution or Elizabeth — that appear in the test passages so that children don’t have to spend extra time making sense of them. Teachers will also read the question-and-answer choices to dyslexic students.
“Dyslexic kids have problems with proper nouns because they’re not high-frequency words. A lot of time, proper nouns really trip them up,” said Victoria Young, the state’s director of TAKS assessment.
To minimize fatigue, dyslexic children will also take the untimed reading portion over two days, rather than being asked to finish it all in one sitting. Third-graders, for example, will read two passages and answer an average of 23 questions each of the two days, Young said.
Referring to students with dyslexia and using the 20% prevalence estimate promulgated by some, Ms. Radcliffe leads with how the accommodations will affect 1000s of students. I suspect those two figures don’t go together. Drawing data from the 25th Annual Report to Congress, I estimate that Texas has about 4.8 million school children, so 20% would be about 1 million students getting accommodations. I bet Texas isn’t going to be offering accommodations to that many children. I’d have to guess that it’s going to be some subset of the approximately 250,000 who are identified as having Learning Disabilities.
Link to Ms. Radcliffe’s article.
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