Understanding Accommodations and Modifications in Special Education

As previously discussed, your child’s special education services to focused on specially designed instruction. We reviewed some of the ways that your child might receive the services through direct instruction from a special education teacher or the services provided by an expert like a speech-language therapist or mental health provider. Today, we are going to discuss two additional special education services, accommodations and modifications changes to:

Accommodations are changes that are made to help your child access grade-level instruction, as well as assessment activities. Accommodations are put into place to assist your child in accessing general education curriculum and to compensate for their disability. They do not reduce learning expectations for your child. Accommodations often just change the way your child approaches or completes an activity, but the activity itself is the same that all students are completing.

Accommodations are often grouped in the following areas:

• Presentation accommodations adjust the presentation of the curriculum or an assessment without changing learning expectations. Examples include:
  • Repeating directions
  • Reading text aloud
  • The use of larger print textbooks
  • Provision of notes or outlines
  • Audio books
• Response allows the students to complete their schoolwork in a different way than usual. Examples include:
  • Using assistive devices like computers, adaptive writing utensils, dictated answers, or graph paper to help to line up math problems.
• Timing/Scheduling changes the amount of time or how the activity is scheduled. Examples include:
  • Increase the amount of time allowed for your child to finish an assignment
  • Be allowed frequent breaks during a tasks
  • Split tasks/assessments over multiple days
• Setting changes something about the location of the activity for your child by:
  • Providing a study carrel or shield to reduce distractions
  • Providing headphones to reduce auditory distractions
  • Allowing your child to take a test in a smaller classroom with the special education teacher

Modifications are changes that impact the curriculum standards or change what is being measured to help make the curriculum better fit their individualized needs. Examples of this include:

• Allowing outlining instead of writing essays
• Modifying length/expectations of assignments or tests
• Using alternative materials on the topic being studied, such as using texts that are easier to read

Given that modifications change the content and learning expectations for the student, so they should be carefully considered by the parent and IEP team.

Here is an example of accommodations and modifications that could be used with the objective to learn the 50 US States:

Helpful Handouts

Additional Resources