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Abstract
Due to various technical and methodological challenges, PISA has to date offered only limited accommodations for students with special education needs (SEN). As a result, some students are currently excluded from the PISA target population at the sampling stage, and in some countries, exclusion rates are growing as more and more students are recognised as having disabilities that require testing accommodations. This practice in PISA contrasts with testing standards in many countries which call for the inclusion of students with SEN in order to give every student the right to demonstrate their skills and to generate information that represents all students. In order to take stock of the situation in terms of exclusions from PISA and accommodations already offered in national evaluations, we conducted a survey of PISA-participating countries and economies. This paper presents results from this survey and reviews the literature on effective accommodations in order to identify the priority needs to address in PISA, as well as promising accommodations that PISA could integrate to support these needs.
Acknowledgements
We thank Elodie Persem for providing valuable feedback on this manuscript. We thank countries and economies that participated in the system-level survey on accessibility in PISA.
1. Introduction
1. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international large-scale assessment carried by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 2000. It cyclically assesses the learning outcomes of 15-year-old students' and provides cross-national comparisons of educational systems around the world in order to inform education policymakers and stakeholders. PISA collects information on learning outcomes through cognitive tests assessing students' capacity to use their knowledge and skills to solve real-life problems in the domains of mathematics, reading, science and an innovative domain that changes every cycle. PISA also collects background information through questionnaires on students' school environment, attitudes, and well-being.
2. In order to ensure the validity and comparability of the results of the assessment, PISA has maintained strict guidelines on the participation of students with special education needs (hereafter, SEN) providing limited possibilities to accommodate them. Specifically, PISA administration guidelines mention that students with "moderate to severe permanent physical disability" or with "cognitive, behavioural or emotional disability", such that they cannot participate in the PISA testing situation (including "students who are...