Assessment of English Learners—Roles, Purposes, and Types of AssessmentsElizabeth Jiménez

Introduction:Thank you very much for joining me today. My name is Elizabeth Jiménez. And we’re going to be looking at now the assessment of the English learners and the roles, purposes, and different types of assessments. We’re also going to be looking at the process for identification of English learners, and then ultimately the reclassification of English learners as fluent English proficient.

We’re going to also have an opportunity to see some students who are working at those different levels of English proficiency, so that you can better compare and understand what those labels for beginning and intermediate, advanced, what they mean. We have on the overhead transparency for you, or the slide, the terminology that you want to know. There is a lot of terminology when it comes to federal programs and tests for English learners, and all of that is listed for you on the slide that’s called Terminology to Know.

As you listen and follow along, you might want to jot notes about each of those terms or acronyms so that you will be able to remember them. And if you’re going to be taking a test or if you are getting a credentialing program, these are definitely some terms that professionals who work with English learners need to know.

Process of Identification of English Learners:We’re going to begin with the process of identification of English learners. Now you might think to yourself “It’s pretty easy to identify who an English learner is.” Well that might be true in the casual conversations that we have with folks throughout the day; but for the purposes of placing students in a program for English learners, there is a very specific process for identification of those students and then, as I said, ultimately to reclassify them as fluent.

The first step that we follow is we need to know what our state requirements are. Every state has a little bit different requirements and a little bit different measuring stick that they use to determine English proficiency for English learners, but there are some things that are standard across states, mainly because they come either from the federal government or requirements under some court decisions or laws that affect all programs.

So, we’re going to begin with looking at one example of a Decision Guide from the State of California. Now your school or district might use something slightly different, or it might be just the same if you’re in California, but the Decision Guide is based on these regulations and tests that determine whether or not a student truly is an English learner.

I used to joke with some of my students in the university that in the old days before we had these tests that had been developed specifically for the purpose of determining English – whether or not students were English learners, we used to use something called the patada test. Now if you speak Spanish, you know that patada means to give

somebody a good, swift kick. Now we didn’t kick the students, but the joke was that under those circumstances, if the student responded by saying “ouch,” they were English speakers and if they said “ay,” they were Spanish speakers. We don’t use anything that silly or informal but we do have quite an involved process. And that’s an important thing for you as a classroom teacher or a principal or an administrator at the district office to really understand.

The first thing that happens in any state is the identification process begins at registration. So, when students arrive at school for the very first time, they are always given an enormous registration packet of forms to fill out. And as the parent or guardian fills out that information, there is a sheet in there called the Home Language Survey. And this is pretty universally used across the United States.

The Home Language Survey is designed to ask a few questions, four questions, about the language that the student speaks now, what language did they speak when they first began to speak, and then the language of the home and the parents or the family members, and what do they speak typically at home. Using that very quick survey as a screening device gives the school enough information to know whether or not they must test that student to determine their English proficiency. If any of the questions are answered with a language other than English, then they do go forward and test them.

Now, there’s a couple of things to keep in mind here. One is that sometimes parents will over-identify. You know, they have a German foreign exchange student living in the home, and so when it asks, “What other languages are spoken by the adults in the home?” they’ll include that. Well, then that’s going to probably cause that child to be tested for English proficiency. The second is kind of an under-identification, and I’ve seen this personally, where a family will go to the school office and someone in the school, perhaps well meaning, will suggest “You really want to put down all English on that Home Language Survey.”

Well, I’ve seen how language surveys where the question about what language do you speak to your child and so forth will say inglés, inglés, inglés. Now if the family truly does speak only English, it is a little puzzling that they would answer it in that way. But this does happen sometimes. So in some states there is a permissive piece of this process that says if the teacher, or the person administering the forms that are being filled out, has some reasonable doubt, like answering a question that I speak only English but it’s answered in Spanish, then they can ask for that child to be tested on their English proficiency test. Not every school district is like that, so it’s important for you to know in your own school district whether or not that is permitted.

The Decision Guide that you have would now take that new enrollee, and we see from their Home Language Survey form that this is a student who does speak a language other than English or has that at home, and the next step would be to administer the identification of the – or the language proficiency test.

So, in every state they have different tests. In California for example, we use the CELDT. And the CELDT is an acronym that stands for California English Language Development Test. In other states, they’ll use – in New York for example, they use the LAB, the Language Assessment Battery. And you get the idea, that in every state they have a different test that will be used for this purpose. But a language proficiency test—remember today we’re talking about different types of tests and different purposes—a language proficiency test is not grade-level specific. It’s not designed to be associated with the content area standards necessarily. What it’s looking at is the fluency or proficiency in English that the student possesses.

So, we will see in some instances that there are beginners in English that are in first grade, but we may also have high school kids who are beginners in English who would score at the same level. And that’s perfectly fine because what we’re trying to get at is just how much proficiency a student brings.

So, nationally we see that in all of the language proficiency tests, they use all four domains, or they’ll test all four domains for students. They’ll look at listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Typically on those tests the reading and writing portion is done in a group setting with several students or maybe a whole class of students together. The speaking portion of the test is always administered one-on-one, the examiner and the student, so that the examiner can immediately score those items and determine where – you know, whether or not it was a correct response or not, and if they’re using some kind of a rubric, a scoring rubric, then they would also assign a score. In California with the CELDT, that’s the case; the examiner will use a rubric to listen to some of those responses and then have to assign a score.

If you’ve never given the language proficiency test in your school, it really would be a very good thing to do at least once to get the feel for the kinds of questions that are asked, the kinds of responses that students give, and especially if they are your own students in your class to know where they have difficulty. So, in many places others give those tests. Some school districts have a newcomer center where new students new to the country will go first; and not only will they be tested in English, but they may also receive some medical or health services and they may also be given information that could be very useful to them in this new community.

So, we have listening, speaking, reading, and writing on the test. Once that is scored, then a determination is made based on that particular test about whether or not the student is going to be receiving services as an English learner. We call this process the Initial Identification Process. And it can be very unnerving to a child, to their family, when the very first thing we want to do is test their English proficiency. Some are concerned because “My child doesn’t know any English.” And of course, we know that’s part of the process, so we want to get a baseline so that we’ll be able to measure some growth. It’s very important to give parents reassurance, to allow that child also a few days sometimes to be more comfortable in their new setting and then administer that English language proficiency test.

In California, schools are required to give that initial identification test within 30 calendar days of enrollment. And that’s to avoid kids enrolling, being placed in a class that’s inappropriate, and languish there for a few months. In this way, everybody has to be identified within a reasonable amount of time after enrolling. In other states, you may have the same kind of requirement, so that would be another thing to find out, but usually this is handled through an enrollment center or the district office or your front office at school.

After the assessment occurs, there is a determination. If the student comes out limited in English, then they will continue through the process; if the student is identified as being initially fluent, and that’s a possibility a student may have on their Home Language Survey, that there is a language other than English in the home, but in fact they are now proficient in English and the test results show that, then that student does not qualify for any special services as far as English language development or ESL. They would be placed in a regular instructional program.

If the student did in fact come out as an English learner from the testing that was done, then the next part of the process will be to place that student in an appropriate placement. Now if the student is in high school, it may be an ESL class, one or more periods of ESL; if the student is in an elementary school, they may be placed in a classroom with students of all different language proficiency levels; and of course, another option is that they might be in a bilingual classroom or a dual language classroom. But they must receive some special services to help to mediate the need that they have to learn English and this content that’s required at their grade levels.

The CELDT – we proceed to the next part of the process that is on the form or on the chart that you have. The next part of the process for every English learner is that annually they must be assessed to make sure that they’re making progress and also to gauge where their language proficiency is for that year ahead. In many schools this is an important piece of the process because it will determine which ESL classes they are assigned, it may determine also whether or not they’re ready for the third part of the process which is reclassification. And reclassification simply means that they are now qualified to be in regular classrooms without the – a lot of extra support, and that student is now proficient in English.

In many states, there is another piece of this process, and that comes at the time when we’ve given the English Language Proficiency Test, they may also be tested in their primary language. Now this is a really helpful tool is for me to know as a classroom teacher that this English learner is very fluent and very, very well versed and can write and read in their home language. That’s a great piece of information to know because I can build on that in class. Conversely, it’s helpful to know if their home language is very, very limited and that’s not necessarily a tool that we can build on in the classroom.

So, the Decision Guide is just an example; and certainly, in California, it is the process that we use, but there are other processes that are used. What is important is that there’s

always some kind of a screening device to determine who gets tested because it’s not a blanket testing of all students.

Now I have heard from many, many teachers, other educators, that “I wonder what would happen if we gave that English Language Proficiency Test to some of our English speakers? Would they come out limited?” And that would be a very interesting question, of course. We know from experience in the classroom there are lots of students who need language development. They may not be getting a rich language environment at home with a parent that reads to them and all of those great things that we know make a difference when kids are trying to develop and acquire a language. They may be from a family that has many, many siblings, and these kids aren’t getting the kind of attention and interaction with language that would help them to grow. So it’s an interesting question, and I suppose some testing companies that put together these language proficiency tests probably have been asked that question about whether or not they norm the test using native speakers as well.

Now let’s take a look at the Home Language Survey itself—you have that in your slides. Now the one that I’ve given to you is sort of a generic Home Language Survey. Many school districts will translate it into the key languages for their own school district, so it will be English on one side and another language on the other; it also might have your school district name on there and so forth. But basically, it’s asking some questions about the student’s schools experience; it asks their age and it also asks, of course, their name.

Now this is a really interesting question. When we get students who are recently arrived in the United States, if in school we ask a child who’s grown up here and who is a native speaker of English, we ask them what their name is, or we ask their parents “What’s this child’s first name or last name?” we know what that means. The last name is the family name and it’s usually only one name, although we have hyphenated names certainly. In other cultures there are different rules for naming children, so it’s really important that as these legal documents are completed and the information is given for registering this child in school that someone is there to explain all of this so we get the right name down on the form and help the parent to understand what we mean. Here, it’s called a given name. Well, aren’t we all given our name? So, that could be confusing to a parent or an English learner when they see that on the form.

The four questions that are listed here, the first asks, “Which language did your child learn when he or she first began to talk?” Now that’s important because if this child began in a language other than English, it will the parent an opportunity to identify that deep language foundation, that beginning language foundation, whereas the parent might think “Now this child speaks English” and only identified if I say “What language does your child speak?” So, the question is worded in this way to get at that early foundation of language. If the parent answers in any language other – or they put any language other than English, then that would qualify to immediately determine to test that student for their English proficiency. Sometimes parents will answer two languages, English and

Spanish, and that’s fine, but if there is a language other than English that shows up, then that student will be tested.

The second question on the list says, “Which language does your child most frequently speak at home?” So that could in fact be different from what they spoke as a baby, as a young child. And so, again this is another opportunity for the parent to identify that information for us.

The third question on the Home Language Survey asks the parents “Which language do you speak most frequently – which language do you most frequently use when speaking to your child?” Now this question is interesting because it is asking about the parent’s proficiency with English. If there is an answer on that line that is a language other than English, then of course that would also trigger the student to be tested, but it also is an indicator for us that if this parent has identified that they speak only English to their child, and we can tell from our interview and conversation with them that that doesn’t seem to jibe, that they may have received a little advice from someone saying “You don’t want your child to be receiving a bilingual education” or “You don’t want them in this program.” That does happen from time to time. And so we want to really be paying close attention to what is written into that form. The other is that sometimes parents will listen if a teacher gives them advice and says, “You know what? You should only speak English to your child.” And although that may or may not be the proficiency, the parent, they may feel obligated that they should write that they only speak English.

So, my point to you is that you should check and make sure that the answers that are given here seem to really jibe with your own observation and experience. This is important because if we do not test the student initially, it’s much harder to catch those kids later on and then try to bring them back in and give them the kind of English language development that they might need.

The fourth item on this Home Language Survey, the fourth question, asks, “Which language is most often spoken by adults in the home?” Now this kind of sounds like the previous question but we know that many times there are other adults in the home. So, if this child, for example, is babysat by the grandmother and grandmother speaks nothing but the primary language of the family, then the child is really being exposed quite a bit to that other language. So, that’s the purpose of that question.

The Home Language Surveys are usually placed in the cumulative record for all students. So, even if you are working with kids who registered for the first time a long, long time ago, you should be able to find that form and see what was the response from the parents on that Home Language. Also one thing to keep in mind is that when the state will do some kind of a compliance review, or if the Federal Department of Education had people in your district really looking to see how money is being spent and whether or not the programs that are described are in fact happening, they may do a quick random check of CUM files to see are there Home Language Surveys in all students files, not just our English learners but for all students because these were questions that were supposed to have been asked all of our kids as they enrolled.

Front Office Role in Welcoming Families and Students Who Speak a Language Other Than English:The next slide that I put up here is one that I have a lot of experience with personally and professionally, and that is what is the role of the front office. And we know that very often it is the secretary at the front, or the receptionist, the secretary of the school, the custodian, and those who serve the school and the school community that have a much greater pipeline or a rapport with parents in the community, and they are truly the face of the school to that community. So it’s very important if you are a principal, for example, to make sure that your front office is completely prepared to receive these students and their families and to think about it in terms of customer service.

We’ve done some studies and we’ve done some work in very large school districts where we’ve surveyed many, many parents. And over and over again we’ll hear that sometimes they don’t feel very welcome; and in part, that can be because of language differences. If the parent is told they must bring their own translator to the front office in order to register, that does create a lot of discomfort because they may not know someone who’s in that role. The second is they may actually rely on their child to be that translator. And although kids may have a pretty good grasp of the social language of English or the conversational English, not always sure that they will be able to decipher all the questions that are on the forms, or answer all of those questions and translate them into English for the parent.

So here are some suggestions or thoughts for you about the role of the front office as students arrive for the first time in your school. The first suggestion is, I guess the question, is asking: Does the sign or kiosk on the front of your school say ‘Welcome’ in the languages of the community? Do they know that they’re really welcome there? Is the front office staff ready to answer the phone and greet all comers in the languages of the community?

And you might be thinking, “Hmm, we’ve got 15 different languages. How is that possible?” But that question that you’re asking is exactly the question that the staff at the school should talk to with one another and with the parent advisory group for your school to figure out: Well, what can we do? Can we have the names and phone numbers of some community members who do speak those languages, so if we have an emergency or if we have a parent come and there isn’t someone that can speak that language and help with their enrollment, can we call on them? There are even services through some of the phone companies where you can call in a phone number and they will bring a translator to the phone. So there are ways to solve those problems, but it’s something to think about and really be prepared for and kind of have a policy in mind as to how you want to address those who come to your school for service.

Another question or another thing to think about: Has the district administration trained the front office staff on the programs for English learners? Now I’m gonna share a very specific personal experience that I had. When my children were young, my mother-in-law and six of her children came to live with us. And her youngest child was only about

eight or nine months older than my oldest child, so the two of them went to kindergarten together—which was a very interesting experience to have your uncle along and part of the same kindergarten class. But when we went to enroll, the secretary in the school sort of discouraged my mother-in-law from placing her child in a bilingual education classroom.

I believe that if front office people really know how those programs work and understand a little bit better what’s offered, that perhaps they can be more of service and not simply use some kind of an opinion that they might personally have. So, it’s important for the school district or the principal to see that the front office staff has some training and understands the programs that are available and offered. Not that they should be the only one to explain it to parents, but when there is a question that they can be supportive and they can be thorough in giving information.

It’s often the front office staff that parents rely on to help them with health questions and to guide them and answer their questions about school culture. Now I’ll give you an example of what I mean. Sometimes students arrive late consistently or they may miss a lot of school. And the school community may make up their minds and say “Hmm, this family doesn’t seem to care about education” when in fact that might not be the case at all. It is important then that the front office staff and others are trained and can explain and talk to the families about how very important it is here in the U.S. for kids to attend school every single day and to get to school on time, and what that means here. It’s not the same everywhere, and we need to understand that; but at the same time, we want to bring the families into the expectations of the school and the school culture.

Understanding the State English Language Proficiency Test:I’m going to talk for a moment about the initial identification process, and again using the example in California of how that process unfolds.

First of all, all students whose primary language is not English based on that Home Language Survey, they must take the CELDT, that’s the California English Language Development Test, within 30 calendar days after they’re enrolled in a California public school for the first time, to determine if they’re English learners. Now I already shared that with you but there are some very key pieces here that we have to keep in mind.

When it says that they’ve enrolled for the first time, that means the very first time they’ve come here from another state or from another country. And this is important because what sometimes occurs is a student will enroll in a school, and then a few months later move to a new school, and then maybe again in that same school year move to another school. If we gave that CELDT test each and every time a student arrived in a new school, not only would we use up a lot of valuable instructional time but we might find that they fall through some cracks because one school gave the test earlier in the school year, another one gave it a little bit later in the school year, and they got a different result. So, it’s very, very important that when they arrive for the very first time in our schools, that they’re given that test. And then beyond that, students will be given the annual assessment and check every single year to see that they are in fact making progress.

The next slide that I have, the Initial Assessment of Language Proficiency, again talking about California as an example, the state designated English Language Proficiency Test, the CELDT, is only in English. As I mentioned earlier, some states will then actually test the students in their primary language; so if I took the LAB in English, I might take the LAB in Spanish, and that way a test examiner or teacher could compare those results and see how the student does in each of their languages. Well in the California English Language Development Test, there is no Spanish version or any other language, primary language, version of that test. So there are other tools that are used for that purpose but it isn’t a parallel assessment that’s given.

Another thing about the CELDT test, and about most of the other language proficiency tests, is that they test the four domains of language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. And they do that because they’re required under No Child Left Behind to look at all four of those domains. Now in some states what happens is if a student is brand new and the begin the listening and speaking portion of the test and it becomes very clear that they don’t know any English at all, they will pause and stop the test at that point and not continue on with the reading and writing portion. In California, students must take all four sections of that test, except for kindergarten and first grade.

And this is kind of interesting, in California the test is not given, the CELDT test is not given for reading and writing in kinder and first grade—makes sense. You don’t expect that an incoming kindergartener or maybe even an incoming first-grader can already read and write in English. Well what’s kind of interesting about that is under No Child Left Behind, we are being asked now by the federal government to have students in California who are kindergarten and first grade to also take the reading and writing portion. Now of course I have to believe that it’s going to be a test that is appropriate for those grade levels. What are the kinds of things that kids do with reading and writing in kinder and first grade? They’re working with letters and sounds and rhymes and word families and that kind of thing. So, that is a bit of a difference.

Another area of the CELDT, and this is found in most other states as well, is that the test is not grade-level specific but rather it tests by grade spans. So we’ll see kindergarten through second grade takes one particular test, third through fifth grade, sixth through eighth grade, and then ninth through twelfth grade. So, those are four different spans. And that means a couple of interesting things.

For example in high school, that means the students at nine, tenth, eleventh, twelfth all take the same exact English proficiency test, but it also means that the high school test is different than the test used for kindergarten through Grade 2. It’s different in the kinds of questions or topics that are on the test; it’s not different in terms of the designation of the level of English proficiency. So once again, this kind of unusual circumstance where you might have a high school student who’s working as a beginner in English language acquisition; you might also have a kindergartener who’s quite far along in their English proficiency and acquisition.

The CELDT test that’s used in California may only be given by a trained – administered by a trainer person. They have to be trained on the CELDT test. Now it seems a little unusual in that some of the tests that we give, the standardized tests that are given in classrooms to test achievement, very often those tests just ask the teacher or the examiner to read aloud some instructions to the class, have them test for a certain time period, and then call “Stop” and collect the test. The CELDT, or other language proficiency tests across the United States, are tests where the person administering the test is going to have to make some judgments about the student’s proficiency. So it is important that they’re trained, and not just trained in how to give the test but how to decide, using a scoring rubric, that is a set of descriptors, as to what level the student is for each and every one of the questions that are part of the test. Again, if you’ve never given your English language proficiency test, I would encourage you to do that. I think it’s a great – it’s a wonderful opportunity to really listen to each and every one of those English learners in your classroom.

Now I’ve described through the process that we use for initial identification, for moving to annual assessment, and then we’ll talk about reclassification in just a bit, but I wanted to make sure that we know that there are three purposes for the CELDT test—or in your state, if you are giving a test other than the CELDT, there are three purposes that are served by this test.

The first is for initial identification. And let me backtrack a moment because I think in some states they actually are using two different tests: one for initial identification and a different test for the ongoing annual assessment. In California, it’s the same test for all, for initial identification as well as the ongoing.

The three purposes of the test is (1) to identify those students who are limited English proficient, just the initial identification and determination if they need services. The second piece, the second step, is to determine the level of English proficiency of students. And what that means is “Okay, the first thing is I’ve identified, yes, that’s an English learner. The second is, so what level are they? What proficiency level is this student?” And then the third is to assess the progress of limited English proficient students in acquiring listening, speaking, reading and writing.

So, those three purposes are served by one single test. And the test itself came about because there was a need for legislators and policymakers to get a much better idea of whether or not English learners were in fact making progress and learning more English, and there was no statewide testing to make that determination. Every individual school district used a different test, so we couldn’t compare from district to district or across the entire state. The other thing that was a drawback is if this student moved a neighboring district, I did have to retest to find out what that means because the two language proficiency tests might not be equivalent in their description of what that student’s level is.

So, the CELDT and the other language proficiency tests throughout the United States are each based on a set of English development standards. Now for many states, these

standards were initiated because of No Child Left Behind. And under No Child Left Behind, states were given some tasks, and these tasks were designed to achieve greater accountability towards our English learners.

The English Language Development Standards for California, where I’m working and where I work with the legislators quite a bit, started in 1999. The State Board of Education adopted English Language Development Standards for kindergarten through Grade 12. What’s significant about that is it did occur before No Child Left Behind, so we were having a lot of – we had a lot of experience working with English learners for many, many years. And in fact, it was California and some of us who worked in the policy arena who began something that is now used very widely on a national basis, and that is the called the Language Census.

We, every single year in our schools at a given time during the year, take a census of how many students are at which levels of proficiency, what kinds of programs are they placed in, and what kinds of credentials do their teachers have, so we have a pretty good idea for our policymakers, whether they’re local or at the state level. Back in 1998/1999 the legislators were trying to make some good budget decisions, there had been a change in California policy with the advent of Proposition 227 which restricted and changed the default in California for English learners, where in the past students who spoke a language other than English, if there were 20 or more at a grade level at a school they would then be placed in a bilingual setting. That was the default. And Prop 227 changed that around so that the students would by default be placed in an English language program; and if their parents chose something else, they could do that.

So the set of standards was developed and it was adopted by the State Board of Education in ’99, and these standards identify what California English learners in public schools must know and be able to do as they progress towards full fluency in English and proficiency in state English-language arts standards. So, that’s what those standards are for; they are not grade-level specific.

The English Language Development Standards are organized within those four domains of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and they are separate by grade spans. So you’re going to see more appropriate things for a high school student in that Grade 9 through 12 grade span than you will see – you know, those same things are not in the primary grades, things that we would expect for kindergartners to be able to do and so forth. But what these standards do is they create a nice blueprint so that if I’m an instructor and I’m looking at my class and trying to figure out for this middle school or high school student what are they missing, what would they have had in English language development had they arrived in an earlier grade level, I can see that across this span of standards. And that can be very helpful in planning instruction.

The levels through which English learners progress towards the standards are identified in California as beginning, early intermediate, intermediate, early advanced, and advanced—so, there are five levels in California. In other states there are four or even three levels of English proficiency. What’s most important is that we look at the

standards and those proficiency descriptions for our own state and for our own school district, and really get to know them well. But what you need to know is not that kids in California actually go through five levels, that language is a continuum, and so those five levels and someone else’s three levels really do correlate, they’re just different ways of describing that same continuum of learning. And if you’re interested in looking for the state standards for your state, they are posted usually at the State Department of Education website, and you can call them up.

Some states have chosen to adopt the TESOL standards. This is an organization; TESOL is the Teachers of English Speakers of Other Languages. And there is a set of standards that were development by this organization that is really dedicated to the acquisition of English for English learners; and so, many states have chosen to use those. In other places, California standards are not like that but they are designed to work together with the English-language arts standards which are the reading and writing standards for all kids in the state of California.

So let’s take a look now at some of the types of questions that we encounter on language proficiency tests. And again, I’m gonna use the CELDT because that’s the test that I’m very familiar with here in California, and it’s a test that you might be using; if you’re here in California, you’ll be using that same test. I’m gonna look at the different question types for listening and speaking first because those two are the beginning levels and they are also usually the items that are administered one-on-one.

So starting with the listening items on the test, what is it that we’re trying to find out? What we’re trying to find out is can the student listen and comprehend. Now that’s tricky because most of the time when we’re testing listening you would think “Well, we’re also gonna have to test speaking because usually your response would show whether you or not you understood.” But what the language proficiency test, the CELDT, does is it has three types of questions, and they are nonverbal responses on the part of the student, whether it’s bubbling in an answer, using a picture cue, or whether it’s physically following directions. So let me just share with you the three types of questions that are given.

The first is following directions. And following directions is something that children learn from the time they’re toddlers all the way through school; they’re to listen to and then carry out some kind of action. Well, the same thing happens on the language proficiency test. I may have a picture and ask the student “Point to the picture of the boy” or “Circle the picture of the flower.” And in that way, I know that they’ve understood because they’re following those directions.

A second type of question that appears on the CELDT test, and might also appear on the test that you’re using, is something that they’ve called teacher talk. And teacher talk is to try to imitate some things that would go on in the classroom, and have students respond, again bubbling in or circling an answer. So teacher talk might be something like, and I’m creating this myself, “We’re going to be going to the museum. I need everyone to bring their permission slip and lunch in a bag for tomorrow. What are the two things that you

need to bring with you tomorrow? You need to bring your lunch, and?” And then the child would circle or bubble in and indicate that they’ve understood. So, it’s that kind of listening exercise.

And then the third for the listening segment of the test, and this is a common one that occurs in many of the language proficiency tests across the country, is listening to an extended story, and then having to show comprehension. So the teacher or the examiner would read aloud a lengthy story and it might have some pictures, and then the student has to respond by making a choice based on a question. So they would, again, bubble in or a use a picture prompt to show what they’ve understood.

So, that’s the listening part of the test. Now the speaking part is that part that’s one-on-one, where the examiner sits across from the child and is going to ask a series of specific questions that go from easier to more difficult, and try to get at different types of language, social language, conversational language that is, or – and also academic language that might in fact be used in the class. And the tricky part about this is if this is a brand new recent arrival student, and the questions are so specific to the school experience here in the United States, we have to be careful of something called test bias, where the student is not really answering a question about their knowledge of school, rather they are unfamiliar with some – for example, a microscope. And maybe they’ve not had experiences with that, so they might miss that question and it’s not because a language difference but rather an experience difference.

In the speaking section of the CELDT are four different types of questions. The first are oral vocabulary. And these are rather simple. There are a number of pictures that the student is shown, and there are questions asked: What is this? What are these? What is this used for? And the student is then expected to respond in usually one-word answers or very short answers.

The second type of question is something called choose and give reasons. And in this case, the student is given a prepared choice. They’re shown two pictures or they’re given a prompt, where they’re asked their preference and so they have to choose between two things. So for example, again I’m going to make up a question because I’m not using anything that’s off the test, but if I were to say “I’m gonna buy you a toy. Would you rather have a stuffed animal or a board game?” And then the child is to answer back and choose one of those two. Once they’ve made the choice, then we follow up that question by asking them “Give me at least two reasons. Why did you choose that? Give me at least two reasons.” And then you’re asking for them to sort of rationalize or support their rationale.

The third type of question is something called speech functions. And speech functions are a little bit different, whereas the vocabulary we were looking for very precise terms. And as an example in the vocabulary section, there might be a picture of a tomato, and I might say, “What is this?” If the child knows it’s a tomato and they say “tomato” that’s fine; but if they know that it’s food and they answer, “It’s food,” that’s not the precise vocabulary that we’re looking for. It’s not that it’s a wrong answer in the conceptual

way, but for the purpose of the test we’re looking to see do these kids know the labels for things in English. Now when you get to speech functions it’s sort of the opposite. We’re seeing can this student construct a verbal answer that will get them what they need or will take care of the function that is the focus of the question. Let me explain a little bit.

As far as speech functions, this is how we use language throughout the day in many different settings and for many different purposes. For example, in speech functions we might have a question about how to ask someone a question, how to invite someone to a party. Now those both might be questions but they have very different purposes and probably some structures and language that go along with that experience.

It might be that for speech functions the function would be borrowing. How do you borrow something in the English? So the question, and if you look at some of the released test questions that are on the State Department of Education website for the CELDT you’ll see one of the questions that asked about borrowing, and it said to the student “Your friend has a blue marker. You want to borrow your friend’s blue marker. What would you say to your friend?” So, a student listens to that, and then has to produce or figure out a way to get that blue marker. And we know there are many, many different possibilities. They could say, “May I borrow your blue marker?” “Could you lend me your blue marker?” “Hey, let me have your blue marker.” Those are all possibilities, they all work. Now we might judge, if we’re going off in a different direction we’d say “Hmm, one was more polite” or “One was more formal” or, you know, the kind of response that we would like to hear our kids give, but the bottom line, the litmus test is that it did satisfy that function, they were able to borrow the marker.

The fourth area of questions that will appear on the CELDT test, and on many, many other tests throughout the United States, is something called a four-picture narrative. Now this type of question is trying to get at having the student give us a lot more language, to really give us a longer sample of their speech, not just answer in one-word questions or good old small answers. So the four-picture narrative will put out a display of four pictures, kind of like a comic book series, they’re numbered one through four, and then the student is asked or given a little prompt to begin that sets up the scenario and then says “Now, you tell me the story.” And the student is supposed to then follow the sequence and tell a story based on the – you know, giving the details of what’s going on in the picture and so forth.

The person that is scoring that test is then using a rubric where they will score it on a zero to four points based on the kind of response. And what are the things that we’re looking for? We’re looking for native-like proficiency. So that means that in that kindergarten through second grade span, there may be a few grammatical errors because kids in kindergarten and youngsters that are learning their first language are still making some grammatical errors, so that’s not an impossibility. We’re also looking for fluency. We are looking for richness of vocabulary. Remember the example I gave before about tomato, and if the student answered, instead of “tomato” they said, “It’s food”? Well that’s a much broader, more general answer. So, we’re looking for kids to use real precise vocabulary and description in the course of their four-picture narrative.

Now the next slide that I’ve given you is the actual sample Student Proficiency Level Report, and this is available to you on the website for the state of California. In Texas, you’re looking for the TELPAS, and it also on the Texas Education Agency website, New York state and so forth, you can find them on your state website. This sample is one that we can all look at and then take a look at your own report that’s given to you by your district or state regarding the students’ language proficiency.

So let’s take a look at the different categories. You can see all four of those language domains are there. And along the left-hand side of the report, there are five levels of proficiency. From left to right I see that there are some bars on a bar graph. The first one, the darkest one, is the overall level of proficiency. So according to this test, when things are averaged together and brought together, overall this student is considered an intermediate proficient student in English. But that really doesn’t help me, and I’ll tell you why.

When we think about averages, averages are – they don’t give us a lot of precise information. There’s a story about a man who put his hand in a pot of boiling water and his other hand in a pot of ice and said, “Well on average the temperature’s fine,” when you know that those extremes can be very, very damaging. So, we’ve got to look at our average score, and then figure out the sub-scores and see. So, this student we can see is a kindergartner, and the listening score is up in the advanced level. Now keep in mind that on most language proficiency tests, when it says advanced, they’re not really meaning advanced like this is a superior language proficiency level. What it’s saying is advanced enough to be native-like in proficiency for an average speaker of English.

The next column talks about speaking, and this student scored at an intermediate level in speaking. Again, doesn’t give us a whole lot of information; but if you were to flip over this report, you would see all five of those levels and a description for each one, what they mean, so it’d give you a little bit more information. And then for reading and writing, I notice there’s nothing there. Remember that kids in kinder and first grade in California are not taking the reading and writing proficiency test for English.

Most English language proficiency tests also have some specific types of questions for the reading and writing, although these really vary a lot more than the speaking and listening types of questions. Let’s look at the types of questions that are on the CELDT test in California but that might also be on the test that you use.

First of all in the area of reading, we look at fluency and vocabulary and then comprehension. If you think about it, reading and comprehension is really the critical skill for those students who are English learners because it doesn’t help to be able to sound out words or to be able to call off high frequency words and then not really understand what they mean. But the reading test is all bubble-in, multiple-choice types of questions, very similar to what they would see on a standardized test for reading/language arts.

The writing portion of the CELDT, and in many other language proficiency tests, will give them an opportunity to do three different types of things. The first is a set of multiple choice questions and answers. So, it may show them some words that are misspelled, or it may have words – or it may have sentences and ask the student to choose the one that sounds the best or that’s written correctly. And so it will have some grammar issues or spelling or capitalization, punctuation, but also it might have a syntactical error, that is the words out of order where they should in English, and they are to choose the best answer.

Then the other two types of questions for the writing section include writing sentences, that is individual sentences, and writing a complete short composition. The writing sentences section has usually four or so pictures, and they are to write a single sentence or they are to write once about each of those pictures. Now for some students, the trickiest part of that is that they are actually going to look in the test booklet, the question booklet, and see the picture, and then have to write their answer in the answer booklet.

So one suggestion I always make to teachers is to practice bubbling in, it’s a life skill, so practice bubbling in and transferring from one book to the other; and with writing, give the kids a chance to look at a picture and then they have to write it on another sheet of paper. When they take the test, one of the problems is that sometimes they’ll write their sentence on the wrong line. And then they may have had a wonderful, complete, perfect sentence, but they don’t get credit for it because it’s written on the wrong line—so a little minor thing.

The other element that I mentioned, the short composition that students are asked to write, in the lower grades, in the elementary grades, they’re given a prompt and picture cues, in the upper grades it’s simply a written prompt, and they’re asked to write a short composition. Now one recommendation that I would have for you is to go online to the State Department of Education website, and download the rubrics that are used for CELDT, and the writing rubrics especially because that can be useful to you throughout the school year to look at different pieces of writing that your kids do. And check and see are they making progress in English writing? And are there areas that you can identify and diagnose that you could do additional instruction and practice with those students to help them along?

The rubrics for the writing sample go from zero to four—zero being doesn’t meet the criteria at all, and a four being a really stellar example. So most English learner students, if they can score at a three on this writing sample, that’s a fine score and that will suffice for them. The four is there because, and sometimes teachers will ask me “Well if the four is like some incredible example, why do you have that description level?” If you think about standardized tests, typically what a standardized test will do is it will contain questions that go far beyond the grade level that’s being tested so that when a parent gets the report back about their child’s reading level, they can see that their sixth grader is reading at a ninth grade level. Well the only way to determine that is having questions that actually are of a higher level or more demanding questions so that you can get that score. So, for the short composition that’s the case as well.

So, you see that there are all different types of questions that are part of the CELDT and any other language proficiency test because each of these domains have different characteristics and features. And what we’re trying to do is really get at not just conversational ability but can our students use English in the classroom to really learn the academic content and master the standards that they’re given at their grade level.

The next slide will give you another sample report for a student. Now this one’s a little different. If you look at the far left on the report, you’ll see that this student is in Grade 2. The one we looked at previously was for a kindergartner. And the kindergartener did not have any score in the area of writing – reading or writing. This student does because at second grade is where it begins in California to include reading and writing as part of the language proficiency test. In other states, there is usually some score at all grade levels for all four domains.

In this report, if you’ll look again at the left-hand column you’ll see all five of the levels of proficiency. If you could flip this over and look at the back, what you would see is a grid that also has these five levels and it has descriptors for each area of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and it describes for you what a student at that level can do.

As I look at this report, it begins with listening and speaking being portrayed. And this student scored in the advanced level for listening and speaking. But I notice in the reading column there is a tremendous drop, it’s way, way down at the bottom of the beginning level so we kind of wonder about that. And I might think initially “Well this student doesn’t have literacy skills in English.” But then when I look at the writing column I can see that that goes way, way up to the advanced level. And so, it’s a little bit puzzling to see why we would have such a low score in reading, such a high score in writing. And one of the answers could be that the student didn’t take that reading portion, didn’t get a score. Or in this instance, if you were able to look right above the place that says Observations at the bottom of the test, it tells us that this student was a special education student; and according to their IEP, they were given an alternative assessment for reading—and so that’s why the score appears to be much, much lower.

If you notice the last bar on this grid where it talks about the overall student proficiency level, the darkest bar is now in the intermediate column. So once again, it’s really important to know something about averages. On the bar graphs that look at all the sub-areas for listening, speaking, and writing this student’s in the advanced column, but for reading, it was way at the bottom. So that intermediate, not sure that that’s a really accurate picture of this student overall. So, keep that in mind as you’re looking at these tests and asking yourself some of these questions as you go along.

SOLOM—Observation Checklists and Rubrics:The next piece that I wanted to share with you is a different type of test. It is used in the state of Massachusetts, for example, as part of their annual assessment. This is an observation matrix. So we’ve looked at proficiency tests that have some structured,

systematic questions that are used and that are standardized, but now we’re gonna shift for a moment to a different type, and this one is an observation tool.

The Student Oral Language Observation Matrix is a tool that was designed in the San José Unified School District in California but is used nationally. It is in the public domain so you could use it in your own school district. And in many places, they will actually do some training with teachers, with parents to use this observation tool in English, or even in the primary language of the student. And basically, what this tool does is it has five areas that it will look at. And when I say look at, what I mean is we would observe a student in the course of their regular interactions in the classroom, not something special like the CELDT test I was describing. During the course of their regular interactions, the teacher can actually mark on this observation tool what they see or hear from the student.

So, the SOLOM has five areas, and those five areas are comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, so those are five component parts of language, and then it goes from one to five. So the way that this would be used is as you observe, you mark one box for each of those five areas, and then add up the numbers. So if the student got three, three, two, one, one, you would add that all up and you would come out with an overall score—so it’s a fairly simple tool to use.

The key to any kind of rubric or matrix like this is that the descriptors that are there, we might think “Oh, I know what those mean” but we have to make sure that there’s some calibration with everyone who’s using that tool, so that we all understand when it says “native-like proficiency” what does that mean; or when we say “frequently uses the wrong words, conversation somewhat limited” what does that mean, somewhat limited? So, we do need to – even with an observation tool need to do some training and some calibration across the people that might use that in the classroom. These are great in school districts where you have many languages that are not common languages and that you have lots of resources, this is a very good tool to observe the primary language of the student.

Title III AMAOs (Annual Measurable Achievement Objectives):The next piece that we’re going to look at is what does the No Child Left Behind require states to do as far as testing is concerned. And this is important for you to know on a professional level. It probably doesn’t affect you on your day-to-day teaching, but it’s definitely something that you will be involved in, in hearing about at your staff meeting, or if you work at the district level you would have to put together this information.

The No Child Left Behind law requires that school districts and – actually that states set three annual measurable achievement objectives for any schools or districts that are using Title III money. And Title III monies are those funds that are specifically for the English learners in a school district. So, the federal government said that, “If we’re going to give you money, we’re also going to hold you accountable for that.” And the AMAOs, or annual measurable achievement objectives, for English learners are three.

The first is that they want to see an annual increase in the percentage of students – percentage of English learners making progress towards English proficiency. Now in California that means one level on the CELDT per year; they want to see an increase in the student’s progress. As a classroom teacher if you’ve never really looked at the scores for the students beyond your own year, that year that you’re working with the kids, you might want to look at previous years.

Recently when I was doing work with a very large school district, we did look specifically at that and found that many, many of the English learners had entered in kindergarten and were now in middle school and some of them in high school, some of them had been English learners for ten years. Now is that a function of the test? Is it a function of the instruction they received? Were those transient students? These are some of the questions that came up. What we found is that these were pretty stable populations, they had not been moving around a lot as we might have assumed. So that’s an important question for you to look at is are your students making adequate progress, or are they getting stuck at a particular level. And we do see lots of kids stuck in that middle/intermediate level of proficiency.

The second AMAO, or annual measurable achievement objective, asks states to define and to show an increase in the attainment of English proficiency. So the first one had to do with progress, the second one says, “Show us that you’re increasing every year the percentage of students who actually meet that goal.” Now that part of the process is called Reclassification, and that means that they’re no longer considered limited English proficient but are now fluent English proficient.

And then the third AMAO is about making annual yearly progress, AYP—you probably have heard that many times—in the academic content areas. So this is the place that forces school districts to really look at that subgroup of kids who are identified as English learners to make sure that not only are they learning English but they are also learning their subject areas and doing well and making progress in the subject areas that are tested, which are reading and math.

Under No Child Left Behind, English learners must be tested annually—we heard that. In California, they’re tested annually in the fall between July 1 and October 31. Now this is a really unique thing because in other states, actually in 48 other states, the annual testing is done in the spring, at the end of the school year, to see how much – to measure how much the students have actually grown and acquired English.

In California, and remember I said 48 states earlier, well the other state that joins California in testing in the fall is Montana, so California gives that annual test of progress in the fall. And unfortunately what school districts find is that by testing kids in the fall they may have been off for two or three months and not practicing their English, so it may not be their peak of proficiency. The other part is that when we’re ready to reclassify students to fluent English proficient, we usually do that towards the spring of the year in preparation for them moving into middle school or into high school. And by having the score from September being used now in May to make that determination,

we’ve kind of lost out on some of the growth that the student actually made; we’re not able to count that towards the reclassification, so it’s a little bit of a puzzle. But every state must test annually to make sure the students are making progress.

All English learners must take the CELDT or they must take their English language proficiency test in California and the results are reported to parents. Now you notice I kind of emphasize that they must take the test. You know that in special education, for example, parents actually have to sign a permission that their child can be tested. Well we have obligations with English learners under a number of laws and court cases that say that schools have an obligation to make sure that these students can actually access the instruction that’s being given. And so, we really don’t have a choice about serving students, and that was done and designed so that a district couldn’t just simply say, “Well, we don’t have the capability. We don’t have the means or the resources or the teachers that can do it.” So, those are three things to know about the annual assessment.

Reclassification:So we’ve looked at the initial assessment, we’ve looked at the annual assessment, and now we’re gonna look at reclassification. The whole goal here for an English learner is of course to stay up and try to do well on achievement in the academic arena, but it’s also to acquire English. So reclassification is that time, that official time, that says we’ve met all of these criteria, now this English learner is ready to be considered a fluent English proficient student.

And under No Child Left Behind, there are still some ongoing requirements that say once a student has reclassified, we need to continue to follow them and monitor their progress to make sure that they’re not falling behind. Monitor their progress often means just looking at test scores. In other districts or some districts throughout the state, the reclassification students are actually monitored and someone’s meeting with them and giving them some additional help and support to make sure that they don’t lose ground at all.

So on the slide that talks about reclassification, it mentions that school districts first of all must establish their own reclassification criteria. Now this does differ from state to state and from district to district, so I’ll just kind of give a general idea here.

In California, school districts have to establish their own criteria but it has to be based on a framework that the State Board of Education has provided. It has to be a multi-criteria process. Now what that does is it takes us away from simply saying, “Oh, you passed this quick snapshot test, you’re ready to become English proficient.” We really want to make sure that students get all of the support that they might need and deserve.

So, a multi-criteria process includes, in California, four things. The first is of course the CELDT test score, the English Language Proficiency Test score. Does this student score high enough on this exam, on this proficiency test, to show that they really do have basic English proficiency?

The second area that’s looked at is their academic achievement. So, in California a student who’s an English learner who’s moving towards reclassification would need to score at a basic level in reading/language arts and math so that they are ready for the next step in the reclassification process.

Now I mention math, some school districts will use that and others will not; so, it isn’t a requirement from the state but some do. Some school districts add additional requirements for reclassification. For example, if a student or an English learner is in high school, they may not be permitted to reclassify unless they’ve passed also the high school exit exam. So, districts can have some variation from district to district. That’s something to keep in my mind too when you go to the State Department of Education website and you’re looking at your district’s scores or your school’s scores compared to someone else. Remember that they may have a different reclassification criteria than you do.

The other two criteria that are part of reclassification is teacher input and parent consultation. Teacher input for most school districts has been designated as grades that students receive from a teacher in particular classes. And parent consultation, again it’s different than special education where a parent must agree and sign on an IEP. In this instance, parent consultation usually means letting the parent know that your child has reached this benchmark and we believe that they’re ready now to move into this fluent English proficient status and into regular English classrooms. The parent is definitely encouraged to join in the discussion about that; but unlike special education, the parent really cannot object and force the district to not reclassify the student—so that’s a distinction there.

All of these pieces for reclassification are designed to make sure that kids are not thrown into a situation where they don’t get the kind of language support that they need, but at the same time that they’re hopefully not kept too long in this situation where they’re getting very specialized English language instruction.

To find out what your own district’s, school district’s criteria is for reclassification, you probably want to request a copy from your administrator, your site administrator, or perhaps you already have one in a handbook. But there is a criteria for each district, and every classroom teacher really needs to know what they’re working toward.

The second thing that you want to think about your own school district criteria is how can you track the progress of your English learners in your classroom. And by tracking, I’m talking about keeping track of the kind of progress that they are making in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Some school districts use an ESL program, an English as a second language program, one that comes from a publisher or perhaps one that they’ve developed themselves within the school district. That program may in fact have some benchmark tests and some ways for teachers to observe and use an observation list to make sure that in fact kids are making that forward progress in English.

What does – another question you might want to ask yourself is what does each one of your English learners need in order to reclassify. Now this is really a data request. If I know that coming into this new year of school I have ten English learners in my class and five of them are intermediate students, I need to know in addition to that “Well how far away are they from that next level, that overall early advanced level that would qualify them to be considered for reclassification?” I also need to know where they are with their tests of reading/language arts because that’s one of our criteria, and then I have to find out about grades. So I need some way to be able to bring together all of those different types of information and really keep that in front of the entire staff so that kids are not kept back needlessly but are pushed ahead.

Sometimes when we say, “Well, the student hasn’t reclassified yet,” we might think it’s because they haven’t passed the CELDT or they haven’t passed their, in California their CST or their standardized tests of achievement. What we have found in many instances is that kids actually have met those criteria, but perhaps the grade in one of their classes is too low. Well, then they probably need some tutoring or there may be some other issues that we really need to work on so that we can get them reclassified and moved on to the next level.

How can other assessments help? This is a question that I’ve asked here. How can other assessments help? Well, who needs more testing? But I’ve already given you an introduction to one type of assessment, which is that SOLOM, the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix. That’s another type of assessment that can help you so that the kids aren’t going through batteries and batteries of tests, and I can do this on a fairly regular basis to see if there is movement in the right direction.

Another type of assessment that is used throughout the country in many places is the portfolio assessment. Now portfolio is a bringing together of different types of actual authentic student work, and looking at the entire scope of that work to make a decision about whether or not the student is ready for reclassification, whether or not the student is ready to graduate. So, portfolios can be very, very valuable.

We all have stories about a bad day of test taking, so we know that sometimes a snapshot in time measure like the CELDT or some of our standardized tests might not give us great information. But a portfolio is bringing together some essays or some artwork or some projects that the student has done, including oral language projects. If the student gave an oral report and it’s recorded, it might be part of that portfolio. But this is a very, very rich collection of evidence that can be shared with parents, that can be shared with other students, and the student themselves so that they can see how much they have grown in their English proficiency across the year. It’s also for high school students who might be thinking about going to college or getting ready for the job market, having a portfolio of your best work, or even some works in progress to show you are thinking and how you go about the kind of work that you do, can be very helpful in those situations as well.

Five Different Types of Assessments:

I’ve talked about different types of assessments. The proficiency test, that is like the CELDT, tests the students level of proficiency in English as compared to native speakers of the language along a continuum of skills—so that’s a proficiency test.

Another type of test, and you’re probably very familiar with this, is the achievement test. So how is that different from a proficiency test? An achievement test, in California this is the CST, these tests test the student’s attainment of knowledge and skills that are expected at a particular grade level. So we set out a set of standards for fifth grade and sixth grade and eighth grade and tenth grade and so forth, and we’re looking to see how well the student compares to that grade level benchmark in each of those areas. These are norm-referenced tests, and they must be valid and reliable—and we’ll talk about that in just a second.

The third kind of assessment might be an observation tool—and I’ve already covered that. Observation tools are like rubrics in that they give gradations of difficulty, or they’ll have some kind of a descriptor that changes from level to level so that one can place a student on a scale. Now these do require some calibration, as I mentioned, so that each observer is using the same lens and thinking about the same descriptions as meaning the same thing.

And a portfolio I’ve talked about already.

Another type of test is called a criterion-referenced test. Now this kind of test compares a child to objective standards rather than to other students, while a norm-referenced test compare them to a large sample group of students who have taken the test in the past. And a norm group, a norming group of students, is carefully selected, racially and geographically diverse set of students chosen by the test creator to serve as a basis of comparison for most children in a certain population, such as third grade or fifth grade.

Stanine score is another term that you’ll hear on those kinds of tests. Stanine scores compare your child against the norm group, often just within one school or community. So the rating is a follows: a 9-7 stanine is above average; 6-4 is average; a 3-1, below average—so there’s a range there.

A formative test, just like the word form or information, means you’re testing along the way, so how are we making progress. It measures the student’s grasp of the material that’s currently being taught, so think about your own tests or quizzes or spelling tests that you’re giving during the week. And formative tests can also measure readiness, and they help us to guide and inform our instruction so that we can plan for the individual student. So examples might be a quiz, or homework could also be considered formative assessment, portfolios can be as well; whereas a summative test, just like that SUM at the beginning of that word, is a measure of what the student has learned overall. So, some examples would be end of chapter tests, final exams, or standardized state tests.

Issues of Validity and Reliability in Tests Given to English Learners:

We’ll look at reliability and validity and then we’ll conclude. Reliability and validity are two things that are required under No Child Left Behind, so that when a test is given you have to make sure that the result that you’re getting, that you can actually count on it and verify that it is testing what it was designed to test, and that you’re getting consistent information.

So, reliability—and you have a slide with a definition of each of these. Reliability is the consistency of your measurement, or the degree to which an instrument measures the same way each time it’s used under the same condition with the same subjects. So real consistency. It’s reliable. I can count on it. In short, it is the repeatability of your measurement. A measure is considered reliable if a person’s score on the same test given twice is similar. And it’s important to remember that reliability is not measured but it’s estimated.

And validity is the next piece—goes hand in hand. Validity is the strength of our conclusions, inferences, or propositions. More formally, Cook and Campbell in 1979 define this as the best available approximation to the truth or falsity of a given inference. What does that mean? Well, basically what we’re looking for are the tests that are used to determine the student’s achievement or language proficiency, that we can count on them time and time again to give us the same consistent result, that it doesn’t vary and that it is reliable for a group of students.

Now one of the issues that certainly has come up in California is the fact that we only test on the CST or the STAR test which is the standardized test, it’s only given in English. But if you have a population of students how don’t speak English, have recently arrived, or who have been in bilingual programs and receiving the bulk of their instruction in another language, then is it really valid and reliable to test their skills in English only. A question for the courts to decide and for greater minds I suppose to think about.

How to Spot Culture Bias in Tests:One area I mentioned early in joking was about test bias. Now test bias occurs, and we think of bias as a very, very negative thing but it is a description of – in psychometric terms it has to do with the validity of the test.

So for example, I remember seeing a cartoon where there were a bunch of jungle animals around a palm tree. There was a lion, there was a giraffe, there was a monkey, there was a snake, and I don’t know what else. But these animals were all told that they were going to be taking a standardized test, and that they were all gonna be treated equally. The test was to climb that palm tree. Now you can imagine some of those animals would’ve really struggled with that. The reason being is that the test was constructed in a way that some had an advantage and some had a real disadvantage, a disadvantage that would’ve been extremely difficult to overcome, and an advantage that may or may not have anything to do with learning but rather other elements.

So, it’s very important that the tests that we give are free as much as possible of some test bias. So some areas that you might see, four different possibilities that have been studied

and attracted attention have to do with the: Content validity, and that’s very much like the example that I gave, is the content in the test fair and equitable and will the takers of the test know that content.

The construct of the test as well. Am I asking for students to do a task that is not possible for them? For example, I’m testing them about their knowledge of reading and math in English when the student doesn’t speak the language. Then what is it that I’m really testing? And some have this expression that a test in English is a test of English, even though that may not be the way the test was constructed for a different population.

There’s predictive validity and then there’s consequential validity. And I’ve left you some notes here. I’m not going to go into all of that detail because it’s an area in research that doesn’t get lots and lots of attention but you might want to have a little bit of that background.

I have three test bias questions for you, a little quiz, and I want you to think about what’s wrong with each one of these items. The first one is: a Spanish proficiency test for English learners shows a picture of three children standing at a doorstep ringing a doorbell. One is dressed as a ghost, the other a pirate, and another a skeleton. And remember, this is a test in Spanish for students. The test asks, “¿Qué hacen?” [What are they doing?]

Now think about that for a moment. We know that that description probably describes three kids trick-or-treating at a doorstep; but the test is in Spanish designed for kids who are recently arrived in the United States who may not have had any trick-or-treat experience or know about American Halloween. So although the test is asking this question, if the test is expecting the answer to be trick-or-treating, then it’s not a valid item because there’s a bias there, these students would not know that.

The second is a math test is filled with complex word problems. The English learners score much lower than their classmates. What could be wrong with this? Well, either they don’t know the math or they don’t know the words in the story problems. So, for English learners that alone could be a very difficult piece. And it doesn’t necessarily test the math, but it does test math problems that are word problems, and they are part of what we have to do as well.

The third example on our test bias quiz is the vocabulary section of an English proficiency test shows a picture of dolphins leaping in the ocean. The test company is located in Monterey, California, where they field tested this item. English learners in the field test all identified these as dolphins, so it was included as valid. Now what might be wrong with that? Kids who grow up in areas away from the ocean who have never seen a dolphin might not be able to answer that question correctly. So, this is an experiential bias, if you will. These kids live in the area, they’ve seen this, they know that word, and so for many students that test question will be answered incorrectly and we might scratch our kids and wonder “Gosh, these students on the field test all got it right.”

So, those are some things to consider about reliability and validity of tests.

All right, so I’m gonna leave you with a question. I want you to think about this, and you can jot an answer, you can think-pair-share with someone else, but here’s the question. In California, the CST or the achievement test is given only in English, and the results are used to determine AYP of the English learner subgroup. In your opinion, is it a valid and reliable test for English learners? I’ll leave that to you to discuss and think about.

Conclusion:So today, we’ve talked about a number of different elements that have to do with testing and testing in English learners. We discussed the procedures and the process that’s used from initial identification all the way through the process of reclassification to fluent English proficiency.

We’ve talked about different language proficiency tests throughout the country, especially in California, and used examples of the report of student proficiency to take a look at some of the information that we would get about students who are English learners. Whether they’re kindergarten, whether they’re in high school, we’re going to see the report out tells us where they with their English acquisition, not necessarily where are they compared to others in a grade level.

And then finally we looked at a number of different types of tests very, very quickly. And you have notes here that you can go back and check and see those different types of tests if you’re studying for a test that’s going to ask you about them.

I thank you very much for spending this time with me today. This is Elizabeth Jiménez saying goodbye.