What I am Talking About When I Talk About Accommodations.
What I am Talking About When I Talk About Accommodations
By Dr Danielle McEachern-Dugre
“Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well.”
Haruki Murakami
In his memoir about running What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, novelist and amateur athlete Haruki Murakami muses on the connections between endurance running and the work of writing. He defines the most important qualities for a novelist as talent, focus, and endurance. As a neuropsychologist working with bright and ambitious humans, I see this play out in the fraught world of high stakes examinations.
Most of us will never write a novel and may never run a marathon, but we will come up against a task that challenges our talent, our focus, and our endurance. For many people, that will be when we are confronted with a test that matters to us. Whether you are in high school, college, or in post graduate life, that test may take the form of an exam that serves as a gateway to our next goal. There are many of them…the SAT, the GRE, the LSAT, the MCAT, a licensing or bar examination, they all have one thing in common: they are somehow a test that is more than just a test for the test-taker. The tests represent advancement, accomplishment, and possibility. They are formidable in their own right. Regardless of the test, they all use a standard structure (unique to each test). In theory, this makes the tests neutral, they are prized as objective assessments of a person’s potential and skill in the subjects covered. The reality is that very few things are ever truly neutral. The tests measure knowledge, they also measure things that are not related to knowledge or talent. Standardized tests are also measuring endurance under pressure, the ability to direct and hold that intense focus, to read quickly and accurately, to think on your feet, and to analyze information at a high level while also doing so quickly. Some tests will also demand you organize your ideas into a written form with few grammatical errors within a specific window of time.
I have observed these types of examinations to sometimes miss a person’s actual knowledge because the influence of other factors (e.g., test anxiety, reading speed, writing speed, attention) was too strong and interfered with their performance. Everyone may take the same test but everyone does not get to proceed through the test on the same path. Some have a clear path through the test; they only need to race the clock and compete against their own expectations. Others will have a path cluttered with challenges, there may be moments of panic when the brain seems to have gone offline, the wells of knowledge a person brought in with them suddenly paved over with anxiety as heavy as a concrete block. For others, the spotlight of their attention may bounce rapidly around the room or between unrelated thoughts and suddenly they are ⅓ of their way through an exam and they don’t remember what they just read, or the spotlight of their attention can be directed, but the bulb fades too quickly, and burns out when it is still critically needed. A small group of test-takers will walk into these exams with accommodations, for them, this does not mean they get an easier path - but that they get a path that is clearer, with fewer obstacles. This is not an easy path - this is how the path was intended to be. The path was meant to be arduous but it was not meant to be cluttered with obstacles unrelated to knowledge.
Every year we are contacted with requests from bright, hard-working students who have reached the apparent limit of what they can muscle through on raw ambition alone. Standing in front of an unmoving solemn test, the years of white-knuckling through monotonous tasks, relying on the unofficial goodwill of teachers who give extensions to students without formal accommodations or who intuitively alter assignments to help a student master material, appear to have reached a dead end in the form of an exam that stands silent and unchanging. We talk with the students, their parents, read the emails and notes from teachers, and try to assess the patterns that exist to help explain their experience. We guide them through hours of assessments where they are pushed to their limits and then measure the difference that time makes for them. In the end, we have a sense of how they learn, how they perform best, and enough information to understand if accommodations are necessary. When they are, we fill out pages of documentation to justify our recommendations to be reviewed by the exam’s board. We also use what we have learned to give the student a plan for how to approach their test based on their cognitive strengths, supporting areas of weakness, and how to prepare for the endurance needed. Essentially, we complete these evaluations knowing that we can make a strong argument for why a student’s path should be cleared and the board can disagree anyway. Appeals are possible and we will provide whatever documentation is needed, but the board can still say no. In those cases, we want our students to have a tailored plan for how to approach a path through their exam given that it may be uniquely challenging for them. There may be obstacles, but we do not want our students to face them without a plan. In some cases, following up with our clinical staff to provide coaching, therapy, or even medication assistance is recommended. Thankfully, our clinical team has a deep well of diverse talents and knowledge about the brain to help support our students as they work towards their goals.
If you are reading this and see yourself, or your child, or the student you’re advising, reach out to us. We do this work because we enjoy it and because we feel like it matters. It is a gift to be a part of helping another person reach their potential and we do not take the responsibility of this gift lightly.
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