PSYCH 655 Week 6 Test Fairness and Ethics Example

Testing a Deaf Client Fairly: Accommodations, Construct-Irrelevant Barriers and the Ethics of Using Scores

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/655: Psychometrics

Week 6 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The vocational rehabilitation office, its client and testing decisions are composites written for a model paper; professional standards and research findings come from the sources listed.

Fairness is a central concern in testing, and it is often misunderstood. A test can treat everyone identically and still be unfair to some people if features unrelated to what it measures stand in their way. Ms. Hollis, a Deaf client who signs, shows why fairness has to be judged test by test.

The Case

Ms. Hollis, twenty-six, is Deaf and has used American Sign Language since early childhood; she attended a school for the Deaf and reads English at about a seventh-grade level, typical for many Deaf adults whose first language is ASL. She works as a stocker at a big-box store and wants to train as a medical laboratory assistant, a role involving specimen handling, labeling, equipment operation and following detailed written procedures. Her counselor asked for an assessment of her readiness for a community college program.

Our standard battery includes a nonverbal reasoning test, an achievement battery, a manual dexterity test and work samples, most with spoken instructions and several with written English items.

What the Standards Require

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (American Educational Research Association et al., 2014) treat fairness as a fundamental validity issue and call for test design, administration and interpretation that minimize construct-irrelevant barriers for all test takers. They distinguish accommodations, changes in administration that do not alter the construct measured, from modifications, which change the construct and may make scores incomparable to norms. Test users are responsible for judging whether a change preserves the construct and for documenting it.

The Ethics Code

The ethics code (American Psychological Association, 2017) tells psychologists to pick tests with evidence for people like the one in front of them, and where that evidence is thin, to say so plainly when reporting results. It requires consideration of factors such as language and disability that might affect test results and interpretation, informed consent in a language the person understands and explanation of results in an understandable way.

Judging Each Barrier

For each test, I asked what construct it measures and whether hearing or English reading is part of that construct.

The nonverbal reasoning test measures reasoning with shapes and patterns. Spoken instructions are irrelevant to the construct, so delivering instructions through a certified ASL interpreter, with the publisher's demonstration items, is an accommodation. Norms remain usable, with a note.

The manual dexterity test measures speed and precision of hand movements. Instructions in ASL are again an accommodation.

The achievement battery's reading comprehension test measures English reading. Here English reading is the construct, and translating passages into ASL would be a modification that changes what is measured. Since the lab assistant role requires reading written procedures in English, the unaccommodated reading score is relevant and should be reported as such.

The math computation test measures calculation. Written items are acceptable; spoken instructions were replaced with ASL.

The work samples include following written procedures for specimen labeling, which reflects the actual job, so written English is part of the task.

The same interpreter was an accommodation on the reasoning test and would have been a modification on the reading test.

Do Accommodations Work as Intended?

Sireci et al. (2005) reviewed research on test accommodations for students with disabilities, testing the interaction hypothesis: that accommodations should improve scores for students with disabilities more than for students without them, indicating that they remove a barrier rather than simply making the test easier. Evidence was mixed. Extended time and some other accommodations often improved scores for both groups, sometimes more for students with disabilities, while read-aloud accommodations on reading tests raised questions about changing the construct. The authors called for careful study of each accommodation's effects.

This research supports caution: accommodations should be chosen to remove specific barriers and should not be added simply because they might help.

Fairness Is More Than Bias

Helms (2006) argued that fairness should be treated separately from validity and from conventional analyses of cultural bias, and proposed quantitative methods for examining whether group differences in scores reflect construct-irrelevant factors such as experiences associated with racial or cultural group membership. Helms emphasized that test users have an obligation to examine and correct for such factors before interpreting group differences as real differences in the construct.

For Deaf test takers, construct-irrelevant factors include not only spoken instructions but also vocabulary and reading demands embedded in tests of other skills. A math word problem, for example, may measure English reading as much as mathematics.

Informed Consent and Communication

Ethical testing begins before the first item. Through the interpreter, I went over why we were testing, who would read the report and what decisions it could affect, and Ms. Hollis took home a short plain-English summary. She asked whether her reading score would keep her out of the program. I explained that the score would describe one skill, not decide her eligibility, and that the program would consider all results along with her goals. Consent that a person understands is part of fairness: a person tested without understanding why cannot meaningfully agree to it.

Interpreters and Meaning

Using an interpreter raises its own questions. Some test instructions contain terms that have no single ASL equivalent, and an interpreter's choices can make a task slightly easier or harder. I met with the interpreter beforehand to review instructions and agreed on signs for key terms, and the interpreter followed the publisher's demonstration items rather than adding explanations. Even with this preparation, some risk remains that the signed version nudged a task's difficulty.

Interpreting and Reporting

Ms. Hollis's nonverbal reasoning was high average, her dexterity above average and her math average. Her reading comprehension was below the level the program's admissions office recommends. I reported each score with the conditions under which it was obtained, explained which accommodations were used and why the reading score was reported without accommodation and cautioned that norms for the reasoning test did not include many Deaf adults. Results were explained to Ms. Hollis through the interpreter.

Recommendations

I recommended targeted reading support focused on medical and laboratory vocabulary, an interpreter and captioned materials during the program, which the college's disability services office provides, and a meeting with the program to discuss how written procedures are taught. Her strong reasoning and dexterity suggest she can master lab tasks.

Reflection on the Course

Over six weeks the course climbed from norm tables and consistency to validity, then through ability, personality and interest measures, and ended on fairness. Each case at my office showed the same lesson in a different form: a number only means something in relation to a purpose, a population and the conditions under which it was obtained.

Conclusion

Fair testing requires asking, for every barrier, whether it is part of the construct. For Ms. Hollis, ASL instructions removed irrelevant barriers on reasoning, dexterity and math, while her English reading score was reported as a relevant skill. Professional standards, ethics and research on accommodations and fairness guided each decision.

References

American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing. American Educational Research Association.

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Helms, J. E. (2006). Fairness is not validity or cultural bias in racial-group assessment: A quantitative perspective. American Psychologist, 61(8), 845-859. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.8.845

Sireci, S. G., Scarpati, S. E., & Li, S. (2005). Test accommodations for students with disabilities: An analysis of the interaction hypothesis. Review of Educational Research, 75(4), 457-490. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543075004457