Only students with vision and motor disabilities participated in the small-scale item tryouts conducted as a follow-up to the large-scale field tests. These tryouts were intended to produce large enough samples of students using special forms to compare with matched samples of students in the general population. However, an average of 15 students responded to TE items in paper-and-pencil or braille formats at each grade and subject. This number was insufficient for quantitative analysis.
The TE items altered for paper-and-pencil and braille delivery followed the accessible formatting used online. In other words, a matching or matrix item in print and braille corresponded to a matching or matrix item online. A total of 98 TE items were administered to 109 students in grades 3 through high school.
Qualitative analysis of responses to the special forms revealed a range of p values, with 72 of the 98 showing p values above 0.4. These results demonstrate that the majority of students were able to adequately access and respond to the TE items in their hard-copy layouts.
In most cases, the p values of the items on special forms were lower than the p values of the comparable online items. This was not surprising because of the well-understood impact of disability on educational achievement and performance. However, larger samples will be needed to determine the influence of testing modality and format on the difficulty of innovative items adapted for students with vision disabilities.