Accommodation integrated technology to minimize the impact of disability on students' assessment

There is growing interest in computerized systems to increase accessibility of assessments for students with disabilities. Technology offers an ideal platform for implementing Universal Design (UD) principles for assessment to better accommodate student diversity and support broad student participation. The goal of this Phase II SBIR project is to continue the research and development of Assess2Progress: an innovative, easy-to-use, and secure web-based system that integrates Universal Design principles for assessment, allowing K-5th grade teachers to independently create assessments of any type in any subject area and deploy that assessment to one or more students with embedded text-to-speech functions, audio controls, and visual accommodations. During Phase II, we will accomplish four technical objectives. First, we will complete development of a fully functioning software system with tailored teacher and student user interfaces. Second, we will conduct pre-pilot usability testing with K-5th grade students and teachers. Third, we will conduct field testing to pilot the full product with K-5th grade students and teachers in authentic educational settings. The fourth and final objective will be preparing the Assess2Progress system for commercial dissemination.