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Multimodal models are expected to be a critical component to future advances in artificial intelligence. This field is starting to grow rapidly with a surge of new design elements motivated by the success of foundation models in natural language processing (NLP) and vision. It is widely hoped that further extending the foundation models to multiple modalities (e.g., text, image, video, sensor, time series, graph, etc.) will ultimately lead to generalist multimodal models, i.e. one model across different data modalities and tasks. However, there is little research that systematically analyzes recent multimodal models (particularly the ones that work beyond text and vision) with respect to the underling architecture proposed. Therefore, this work provides a fresh perspective on generalist multimodal models (GMMs) via a novel architecture and training configuration specific taxonomy. This includes factors such as Unifiability, Modularity, and Adaptability that are pertinent and essential to the wide adoption and application of GMMs. The review further highlights key challenges and prospects for the field and guide the researchers into the new advancements., Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires the reporting of participation in assessments overall and by subgroup, including students with disabilities. As states and school districts strive to meet the goals for adequate yearly progress required by NCLB, the use of individual accommodations continues to be scrutinized for effectiveness, threats to test validity, and score comparability. This report summarizes 49 empirical research studies completed on test accommodations between 2002 and 2004, and provides direction in the design of critically needed future research on accommodations. NCEO found that studies during this three-year period had the following characteristics: (1) Purpose: The primary purpose of the 2002-2004 accommodations research was to determine the effects of accommodations use on the large-scale test scores of students with disabilities; (2) Types of assessment, content areas, and accommodations: The majority of the studies tested students using norm-referenced or criterion-referenced tests, on math or reading/language arts; (3) Participants: Equal numbers of research studies involved between 1-100 participants, 100-1,000 participants, and more than 1,000 participants of multiple age categories. Participants were varying percentages of students without disabilities and students with disabilities. Students with learning disabilities were studied most frequently among students who receive special education services; (4) Findings: Findings shared no common theme, with various accommodations shown to have both a positive and non-positive effect on scores. Individual accommodations showed either differential item functioning or no differential item functioning depending on the study. The lack of consistent findings points to a need for further research; and (5) Limitations: Most often, authors noted that studies were too narrow in scope, involved a small sample size, or provided confounding factors. These limitations and other considerations led researchers to recommend investigating the characteristics of accommodations in further detail. Important overall observations from the NCEO analysis include a need in future research for a clear definition of the constructs tested, a reduction in confounding factors, increased study of institutional factors affecting accommodations judgment, and exploration of the desirability and perceived usefulness of accommodations by students themselves. Future research should focus on improvement in these areas but also on the positive effects of field-testing potential items in accommodated formats in addition to standard formats. The following are appended: (1) Summary of Research Purpose; (2) Summary of Type of Assessment; (3) Subject Area Studied (by Author); (4) Type of Accommodation Studied (by Author); (5) Summary of Participants; (6) Summary of Research Results; (7) Summary of Limitations Cited by Researchers; and (8) Summary of Suggestions for Future Research (as recommended by authors). (Contains 13 tables.)

Finding ways to improve the design of large-scale tests is a timely issue. Recent changes in Federal legislation (including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001) have placed greater emphasis on accountability via large-scale tests. Students who have previously been exempted from large-scale assessments, including students with disabilities and English language learners, are now expected to reach achievement levels comparable to their non-disabled or English proficient peers. Schools are held accountable for their performance, and their scores are reported publicly. With such high stakes placed on large-scale assessment, there is a critical need for states to have valid information about how the design of assessments affects student test performance. This report provides information on the use of "think aloud methods" to detect design issues in large-scale assessments. Various design problems may introduce construct-irrelevant variance or hinder students from showing what they know on assessments. Research included a variety of students, including students with learning disabilities, students with hearing impairments, students with cognitive disabilities, English language learners, and students without disabilities who were proficient in English. In this project, the authors asked students to "think out loud" when solving mathematics large-scale assessment items. The sentences that students uttered produced data that led the authors to believe that think aloud methods, under certain circumstances, can successfully detect design issues. Specifically, they found issues related to unclearly defined constructs, inaccessibility of items, unclear instructions, incomprehensible language, and illegible text and graphics. To this end, think aloud methods appear to be a useful strategy in the design and refinement of large-scale assessments. Think aloud methods, as the authors designed them, were not effective for students with cognitive disabilities. This population had great difficulty in producing the language needed to explain problem-solving processes and may require additional research accommodations to help them participate in think aloud research. All other groups sufficiently participated in research activities. Think aloud methods also did not produce informative data for very difficult mathematics items because students had difficulty verbalizing their thoughts while solving problems. Despite shortcomings found in this study, the think aloud method appears to be an effective way to determine the effects of item design for a wide variety of students (with the exception of students with cognitive disabilities) and for items with low to moderate difficulty levels. (Contains 6 tables and 2 figures.)

For several years, states have listed accommodations allowed on state assessments. States soon found that the definitions of these accommodations varied not only across states, but also within states and even in schools. Over the past few years, states have made greater attempts to define each accommodation and to decide whether the accommodation provided valid test results. During that time, the National Center on Educational Outcomes has recorded accommodations used by states and their definitions and decisions about validity. As the authors studied accommodations use, they found that there are accommodations that require human assistance in order to administer, but that rarely came with instructions about how they were to be delivered or qualifications of the human assistants. They decided to delve deeper and look for state guidelines for these individuals, who they are now calling "access assistants." Guidelines from state education department Web sites were searched, letters sent, and phone calls made to all 50 states to find out what existed for access assistants. They found 22 states with guidelines for one or more of the access assistants that were the focus of their study--scribes, readers, and sign language interpreters. Variations across state guidelines extended from breadth and depth to format and ease of access. They also found 14 states with guidelines describing the qualifications or characteristics of scribes, readers, or sign language interpreters. The report concludes with a description of several challenges to the development of state guidelines for access assistants, and recommendations for meeting those challenges. The following are appended: (1) State Documents Containing Guidelines for Access Assistants; (2) Examples from State Guidelines for Access Assistants; and (3) Examples from State Guidelines Specifying Qualifications and Characteristics of Access Assistants. (Contains 2 tables.)

This report summarizes the tenth survey of state directors of special education by the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) at the University of Minnesota. Results include all 50 states and six of the eleven federally funded entities (unique states). The purpose of this report is to provide a snapshot of the new initiatives, trends, accomplishments, and emerging issues during this important period of education reform as states document the academic achievement of students with disabilities during standards-based reform. States continue to work on the participation of students with disabilities in state assessments. The calculation of participation rates is based on different denominators in different states. Most states use either the number of students with disabilities enrolled within a month of the test or the number of students with disabilities counted on test day, yet some still use the number of students tested or the enrollment on December 1. Use of accommodations is also documented in some way by every state. The report contains good news: the number of students with disabilities achieving proficiency on state accountability tests is increasing. Most states now have at least three years of trend data and enough evaluation data to be able to attribute increased proficiency to several positive efforts by schools and districts. There have been many changes during the past two years as increasing numbers of students receive the instruction they need to meet grade level proficiency. When states were asked which factors contributed to positive trends found in the survey, at least half of the states credited the following six factors: (1) Clearly communicated participation policy; (2) Better alignment of IEPs with standards; (3) Improved professional development; (4) Development and provision of accommodation guidelines and training; (5) Increased access to standards-based instruction; and (6) Improved data collection. Updates on alternate assessments show continued evolution in various aspects, from the approach itself, to the content, setting of standards, and the scoring criteria that are used. Areas of emerging practice include for a few states item analyses and disaggregating assessment results by English language learners. For about half the states, emerging practice includes field testing in alternate formats and disaggregating assessment results by disability category. Nearly all of the states are conducting further work in the area of universally designed assessments. Appended are: (1) Working Definitions of Students with the "Most Significant Cognitive Disabilities"; and (2) Examples of Current and Emerging Issues. (Contains 9 tables and 11 figures.)