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Recent Research Findings on Assessment Accommodations for English Language Learners. Jamal Abedi. UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies Center for the Study of Evaluation National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. 2000 CRESST Conference:
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Recent Research Findings on Assessment Accommodations for English Language Learners Jamal Abedi UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information StudiesCenter for the Study of EvaluationNational Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing 2000 CRESST Conference: Educational Accountability in the 21st Century September, 2000
A Summary of CRESST Studies on the Impact of Language Background on Students’ Content-Based PerformanceLanguage Background as a Variable in NAEP Mathematics Performance(Abedi, Lord, & Plummer, 1994-1995) • Analyses of existing NAEP data • ELL students performed significantly lower on the long items than non-ELL • The percentage of omitted not-reached items were significantly higher for ELL students • The performance of ELL students was significantly lower on linguistically complex items • Student Perception Study • Original and linguistically modified items were presented to both ELL and non-ELL students • An overwhelming majority of ELL students preferred the simplified versions • ELL students indicated the it would be more productive for them to use the simplified version • Accuracy Test Study • ELL students performed significantly lower than non-ELL students in reading • ELL students performed significantly lower than non-ELL students in math • However, the performance gap between ELL and non-ELL was reduced with the linguistically modified version of test
Impact of Selected Background Variables on Students’ NAEP Math Performance(Abedi, Lord, & Hofstetter, 1997) • Three versions of math test items were used • Original English • Linguistically modified English • Spanish translated version • Booklets were randomly assigned to students within a classroom • All students performed slightly higher on the linguistically modified version • Spanish speaking students taking the Spanish translated version performed significantly lower than others, this may be due to the issue of language of instruction
NAEP Math Performance and Test Accommodations: Interactions with Student Language Background(Abedi, Hofstetter, Baker, & Lord, 1998) • Three different forms of accommodations were used: • Extra time • Glossary • Glossary + extra time • Standard NAEP condition • The three accommodation strategies along the standard condition were randomized within the classrooms across ELL and non-ELL groups • Extra time increased performance of all students slightly • Glossary without extra time did not have much impact on the students’ performance • Glossary with extra time had a big impact on the performance of both ELL and non-ELLs • However, the impact of glossary with extra time was more evident with non-ELL students. This raised concern over the validity of accommodations
Analyses of Existing Data on the National Large-Scale Assessments(Abedi, Leon, 1999, Abedi, Leon, & Mirocha, 2000) • The performance gap between ELL and non-ELL students was largest in reading. • The performance gap between ELL and non-ELL decreased as we moved from reading to science and form science to math. • For some subscales of math (such as math computation) there was not any gap between ELL and non-ELL students • The reliability coefficients for ELL test scores were substantially lower than those for non-ELL. • Our results indicated that language factor may act as a source of measurement error for ELL students.