Tindal described several experimental studies he and his colleagues have conducted. One study investigated the effects of certain presentation and response accommodations on performance on a mathematics test (Tindal, Heath, Hollenbeck, Almond, and Harniss, 1998). Under the presentation accommodation, teachers read a mathematics test aloud (rather than students reading items to themselves); under the response accommodation, students marked answers in their test booklets (rather than on an answer sheet). Study participants consisted of 481 fourth graders-403 general education students and 78 special education students. All participated in both response conditions (marking in the test booklet and filling in the bubbles on the answer sheet), with the order of participation in the conditions counterbalanced (see footnote 3). The test takers were randomly assigned to one of the presentation conditions (standard versus read-aloud). In the read-aloud presentation condition, the teacher read the entire test aloud, including instructions, problems, and item choices.

Findings indicated that general education students scored significantly higher than special education students under all conditions. General education students who received the read-aloud accommodation scored slightly higher than those who read the test themselves, although the differences were not statistically significant. However, scores for special education students who received the read-aloud accommodation were statistically significantly higher than the scores for those who did not receive this accommodation.

The researchers concluded that these findings confirmed the presence of a significant interaction effect and suggested that the read-aloud accommodation is valid for mathematics items. They noted one caveat, however: For this study the read-aloud accommodation was group administered, which Tindal believes may have introduced cuing problems. That is, most students in a class know which students perform best on tests, and, because the tests consisted of multiple-choice items, they need only watch to see when these students mark their answers.

Tindal conducted a follow-up study in which the read-aloud accommodation was provided via video and handled in small-group sessions to overcome the cuing problems. The video was used with 2,000 students in 10 states. Findings indicated statistically significant differences between the means for special education and general education students and between the means for those who received the standard presentation and those who received the video presentation. There was also a statistically significant interaction of status by format-special education students who participated in the video presentation scored three points higher, on average, than those who participated in the standard administration, while no differences were evident between the means for general education students participating in the video presentation and those receiving the standard presentation. For this part, children might have considerations about how to understand a foreign language, learning a foreign language needs a leaning tools, many children choose Rosetta Stone Russian and Rosetta Stone Spanish to learn Russian and Spanish.

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