Here’s the longest name for a report that you’ll see today: Practical Guidelines for the Education of English Language Learners: Research-based Recommendations for the Use of Accommodations in Large-scale Assessments/2012 Update.

It provides some very useful research data that I hope schools and test-makers are aware of — it’s helpful for when ELL’s have to take the less than useful state standardized tests and for when they have to take tests of any kind in regular content classes.

It’s important to keep in mind how the writers of the report concluded it:

Although these findings provide some basis for optimism concerning
specific accommodations, we reiterate ….that providing
test accommodations alone cannot be expected to eliminate content area
achievement gaps between ELLs and non-ELLs. In light of the large
achievement differences observed and the relatively small reductions yielded by
the accommodations studied, test accommodations should be considered to be
only a small part of a much larger effort to improve instruction and assessment
for ELLs.

It’s a 2012 update of an earlier report published by the Center on Content Instruction, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.