New Report: English Language Proficiency Assessment
The federal government, with 2001s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, mandated yearly assessment of English Language Proficiency (ELP) for all ELL students in the nation and demanded states to use reliable and valid assessment. This University of California, Davis report, English Language Proficiency Assessment in the Nation: Current Status and Future Practice, presents a national view of the ELP assessments that existed prior to the implementation of NCLB and those created after, some of which were supported by the U.S. Department of Education.
The purpose of this report is to present facts about existing and newly developed assessments. The report states, We have no intention of evaluating the quality of existing and newly developed ELP assessments or criticizing any of these tests, whether they were developed prior to NCLB or after the law was implemented. Many of the existing ELP assessments have provided valid assessments for ELL students in the past. The following recommendations are based on the information presented in different chapters of this report as well as the review of existing literature on the English language proficiency assessments:
Examine the comparability of the ELP assessment used to establish the baseline with the newly adopted ELP assessment.
Examine the content of your state-adopted ELP assessment and align the content with the state ELP content standards.
Make sure that the ELP assessment items do not differentially or unfairly perform across the subgroups within the ELL population.
Use multiple criteria for assessing ELL students level of English proficiency, particularly with high-stakes decisions such as classification or re-classification of students.
Use ELP assessment results along with other sources to make informed decisions about ELL student participation in Title I assessment.
Incorporate a major measurement research component into your programs that can be supervised and run with your professionally trained staff.
Implement field testing procedures and replenish their item banks and operational test forms on a regular basis so that they do not over-expose current items, tasks, and test forms.
Conduct ongoing reviews of the alignment of items and assessment tasks with ELP standards and the psychometric characteristics of the item banks and test forms.
Plan and implement validity studies on an ongoing basis to examine current issues in assessing English language learners and ELP assessments that were discussed in this report.
To read more about this UC Davis report, click on the URL link below.
Related Resources from SchoolsMovingUp: SchoolsMovingUp's Reading Room section provides articles, books, and abstracts offering practical ideas and models for school improvement. For easy reference, resources are organized by major topics. For related information on English language learners, go to the Diverse Learners section of SchoolsMovingUp's Reading Room.
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