Sylwia Macinska

Vidal Rodeiro, C. L., & Macinska, S. (2023). Teachers’ and students’ views of access arrangements in high stakes examinations. Research Matters: A Cambridge University Press & Assessment publication, 35, 41-59.

Access arrangements are pre-exam arrangements that aim to remove any barriers that might prevent students with specific needs from accessing the assessment and demonstrating their knowledge and skills. Access arrangements are not intended to change the assessment demand or reduce its validity.

Using a survey questionnaire, the present study reports on the views of 258 centres in eight countries around the world regarding teachers’ and students’ perceptions of access arrangements. The questionnaire included a mixture of closed and open-ended questions covering the following themes: awareness and provision of access arrangements; resources to provide access arrangements; views on access arrangements (including their usefulness, fairness, and perceived effectiveness of use); and overall views on access and inclusion.

• Foreword Tim Oates
• Editorial Tom Bramley
• Creating Cambridge Learner Profiles: A holistic framework for teacher insights from assessments and evaluationsIrenka Suto
• A conceptual approach to validating competence frameworksSimon Child, Stuart Shaw
• Teachers’ and students’ views of access arrangements in high stakes examinationsCarmen Vidal Rodeiro, Sylwia Macinska
• Who controls what and how? A comparison of regulation and autonomy in the UK nations’ education systemsPia Kreijkes, Martin Johnson
• Assessment in England at a crossroads: which way should we go?Tony Leech
• Research NewsLisa Bowett

• Foreword Tim Oates, CBE
• Editorial Tom Bramley
• Accessibility in GCSE Science exams – Students' perspectives Victoria Crisp and Sylwia Macinska
• Using corpus linguistic tools to identify instances of low linguistic accessibility in tests David Beauchamp, Filio Constantinou
• A framework for describing comparability between alternative assessments Stuart Shaw, Victoria Crisp, Sarah Hughes
• Comparing small-sample equating with Angoff judgement for linking cut-scores on two tests Tom Bramley
• How useful is comparative judgement of item difficulty for standard maintaining? Tom Benton
• Research News Anouk Peigne

Crisp, V. and Macinska, S. (2020). Accessibility in GCSE Science exams - Students's perspectives. Research Matters: A Cambridge Assessment publication, 29, 2-10.

As part of continued efforts to ensure inclusivity in assessment, OCR has developed a set of accessibility principles for question design in GCSE Science examinations, which has been applied since 2018. The principles are intended to help ensure that all students can demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and skills to the best of their ability. The aim of this research was to consider the effectiveness of the accessibility principles by investigating students’ perceptions of question features in terms of accessibility. Two versions of a short test were constructed using questions with and without the accessibility principles applied. Students in Year 11 (aged 15 to 16 years old) from four schools across England attempted the test and, of these, 57 were interviewed afterwards. Students were asked about question design features relating to the different accessibility principles and encouraged to talk about how accessible they felt the questions were and why. The results revealed that for most of the question features explored in this study, students’ perceptions of accessibility tended to align with expected effects. However, for three accessibility themes, the findings were neutral or mixed.