Earlier this week, I wrote about schools’ and families’ reliance on accommodations for educating students with learning differences. I suggested that accommodations are not especially effective at improving students’ academic performance and that they are nonspecific to students’ cognitive profiles. Nevertheless, schools continue to rely on them, and families continue to request them. 

A few months ago, I asked Dr. Alison Pritchard, the co-director of the department of neuropsychology at Kennedy Krieger Institute, how schools should determine and use accommodations, given these apparent issues. 

(Dr. Pritchard was the lead author of a 2016 paper that measured the effectiveness of five common accommodations on reading and math performance in 3rd-8th grade students with ADHD. Her study found that none of the accommodations led to improved academic performance, and one accommodation (access to a calculator) led to decreased academic performance.) 

Dr. Pritchard was unequivocal in her response to my questions: we should not abandon accommodations. Rather we should focus on how we’re supporting teachers’ deployment of accommodations and students’ use of the accommodations. 

Dr. Pritchard’s point was that accommodations can level the playing field, as they’re intended. But teachers might not know how to teach students how to use accommodations effectively. And students might not know how to use them effectively. The issue, then, she hypothesizes, is not the accommodation, but how to operationalize it. What does she mean by this?

Below, I’ll use most common (and probably the simplest) accommodation, extended time, to explore this issue. Students with an extended time accommodation are allowed to take up to a certain percentage (usually 50%-100%) of extra time on timed, in-class assessments. Pretty simple, right? Not exactly. Depending on the teacher, this accommodation may look completely different. Consider the following approaches to offering extended time on an exam: 

In Classroom A, the teacher lets the students decide which of their accommodations they want to use (including extended time). 

In Classroom B, the teacher requires students with extended time to sit with their exam until their extended time has elapsed. This can get pretty boring. 

In Classroom C, the teacher looks through the test and directs the student with extended time to take another look at section 4 because their work looks sloppy and rushed there. 

In Classroom D, the teacher notices a student with extended time struggling to concentrate, takes away his test, and tells him to come back and use his extended time later, after he’s had some lunch. 

In Classroom E, the teacher hands out the test and asks each student to read through it fully, estimate how long each task will take, and start working through the easiest problems first. Some students start with the hardest section because they know from experience that they’ll be fatigued in an hour. 

In Classroom F, the teacher gives a practice test a few days before the exam. Later, each student identifies how long each section took to complete and ranks the sections from easiest to hardest. They then draft a test-taking attack strategy to use for their actual exam. 

I could go on. 

Depending on the age, time of year, and profile of students, I think all of the above approaches have some validity…with the likely exception of Classroom B (that’s just cruel…). 

However, the teachers in Classrooms E and F are doing something quite different. They are actively teaching their students (and all their students, not just their students with extended time) how to budget and break up the time that they have available to them. They are helping them develop self-awareness about their habits, preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. In other words, the teachers in Classrooms E and F have created full-class intervention around test-taking.

It won’t be possible for every teacher to “interventionalize” every accommodation, of course. But I think if we take these ideas as starting points—both that students need to be taught how to use their accommodations AND that accommodations are probably most impactful when they’re tied to actual learning—we’ll be on a better path.