Accommodations under a Microscope (Part 1)
In this piece, I am going to undermine the value and purpose of academic accommodations, and I’m going to explain how accommodations can undermine academic progress.
When I worked at an independent school, part of my job was to help students, parents, and teachers understand the academic accommodations recommended by the student’s neuropsychological testing. Common accommodations ranged from extended time on assessments, to an advanced copy of teacher notes, to a formula notecard on a mathematics test, to preferential seating, to the ability to take a test in a private room, among numerous others.
Everyone—teachers, parents, students, and certainly the psychologists who were recommending the accommodations—claimed that they were necessary to “level the playing field” for students with learning differences. Put another way, it would be unfair to hold these students to the same standards and coursework as neurotypical students without this extra support i.e. accommodations. I think, in hindsight, some accommodations were and are helpful to some of the students I was working with. But I don’t think they are the panacea that they were made out to be, and they are certainly no substitute for effective intervention. Let me explain.
Accommodations are basically the same, no matter the student’s learning profile. Nearly every neuropsychological report that I’ve read (and I’ve read 100s) recommends that students receive extended, preferential seating, separate or small group testing, advanced access to teacher notes, and scaffolded assignments. While the substance of the reports offers invaluable information about students’ cognitive strengths and weaknesses, the recommended accommodations are remarkably generic, no matter the student’s processing speed, working memory, verbal comprehension, or visual-spatial reasoning skills. If accommodations are the key to unlocking a student’s highest potential, you would think that they would match the specific student’s cognitive profile. But they don’t.
Accommodations are easily modified, often for no good reason. At my old school, if a parent thought that their child would benefit from an accommodation that they did not have and the school would not provide, the parent would simply contact the original testing psychologist and ask them to add the accommodation to the student’s report. The turnaround time for the addendum was usually 36 hours. I don’t believe I ever observed a psychologist deny a parent’s request, and I don’t believe my school ever denied the new accommodation(s), even though the parent was effectively writing them. In addition to undermining the value of accommodations, this process reflects inequities and injustices in the education world that I’m not prepared to explore in this piece. Put simply, parents with financial means and bureaucratic know-how are able to secure unfair and unjustified advantages for their students. This happens every day. At every grade level. At every type of school.
Many common accommodations probably aren’t effective. Unfortunately, there is not very much research on the efficacy of accommodations. The research that does exist is hard to translate across different learning differences, age groups, and classroom environments (even within the same school). And the research that does exist casts doubt on the effectiveness of accommodations. You can take a look at a short review of the academic research that I put together here. Lovett and Nelson (2020) conducted their own literature review of the effectiveness of common accommodations for students with ADHD and concluded: “experimental studies of accommodations often fail to find any efficacy in the sense of improving students’ performance, and it is even rarer that they are found to have benefits that are specific to students with ADHD.” Of course, this is not to say that no students with learning differences derive or can derive benefit from accommodations. Rather, most appear not to.
Accommodations undermine academic progress. There are indeed a few outlier studies that suggest that certain accommodations lead to worse academic performance. But that’s not what I want to explore here. Instead, schools, students, and parents are overly reliant on accommodations when they should be offering and seeking specific, targeted interventions like small group tutoring or a study skills class. Interventions are designed to improve student learning and autonomy, something accommodations explicitly do not do. Again, I’m not saying that accommodations are never appropriate, but an over-reliance on them at the expense of more effective (albeit more expensive) interventions comes at the cost of student learning and progress.
I’ve argued here that accommodations are often ineffective, nonspecific, and easily manipulated by wealthy parents who want their child to have every conceivable academic advantage. But I still don’t think we should abandon them altogether. So where does that leave us? Later this week, I will explore that question and more.
