Coming Soon: "made in Horizon" intake and identification forms and procedures!
Intake and Identification
Coming Soon: "made in Horizon" intake and identification forms and procedures!
Coming Soon: "made in Horizon" intake and identification forms and procedures!
7 comments:
Note: Christopher Browder suggests giving Math and L1 literacy tests during intake of new English Language Learners because these results will be more reliable predictors of their rate of English learning than their grades completed of school prior to intake. (see http://slifebeyond.blogspot.ca/2015/02/do-high-school-english-learners.html )
Dan, have you ever found a way to test math and literacy during intake? I am still foundering on math assessment, because I'm looking for something that assigns a grade to a student. And I'm worried about students' stamina. I also do not know how to assess L1 literacy when it's a low-incidence language. Ideas?
Beth, I am curious as to what you mean by “assessments that assign a grade,” and as to why you need them. Are you looking for grade equivalent scores on standardized tests? I am cautious about using grade equivalent scores because of the inherent psychometric problems associated with them. According to my understanding, those problems limit their reliability and validity and render them unsuitable for informing diagnostic or placement decisions. In addition, a single grade score also tends to obscure the uneven pattern of strengths and gaps displayed by many SLIFE.
Instead, I find it more helpful to use assessments that provide more of a “learning profile”. Benchmark style assessments are our go-to tools for that job. Alberta has some good benchmarking resources for assessing English Language Learners in the areas of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing at http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/eslapb/search_about.html. This resource is designed to help establish baseline proficiency and to identify the level and types of instructional supports these learners require to be successful. At our school we also assess our new students’ English reading skills with the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark assessment system. We don’t have a good L1 Literacy assessment because the first language for most of our students is Plautdietsch which is mostly an oral language. As a result, the first language for print literacy for many of our students is actually English.
It has been harder to get a good math benchmarking assessment tools. In the past we have relied on very informal assessments such as giving students a sampling of tasks from grade level and prior grade mathematics to see how they handle them. There is a list of Learning Indicators for Numeracy taken directly from the Alberta Mathematics Program of Study at http://teachingrefugees.com/instructional-programming/learning-indicators/numeracy/. The identified outcomes in this list are from the Kindergarten to grade 5 curriculum and progress sequentially from kindergarten to grade five level within each strand. It would be very time consuming to test a student on all of them, however, and I would tend to use it as a guide to select some sample questions. For a more detailed list with actual math questions for each outcome in math from kindergarten to grade 9, one could check out the Saskatchewan Common Math Assessments: http://www.nwsd.ca/pages/NWSD/staff/Professional_Resources/Math/SK_Common_Math_Assessments
I agree, however, that student stamina becomes an issue when doing giving comprehensive testing like this, however.
I don’t know if Chris Browder had other specific assessments in mind when he made his recommendation above. Perhaps I will ask him, if I ever get the chance.
Hey, Dan. I only contact you every six months or so, it seems. So I think we connected via email, and my inquiry had to deal with labeling kids as SLIFE. I have met the MALP creators, as well as other SLIFE researchers, and they all say that we need to have a way to assess. The definition of SLIFE is 2 years behind in reading and math in the L1. I think I may have found something that might work for math...if you get rid of word problems: http://www.mathmammoth.com/complete/placement_tests.php
Great to hear from you again! I believe that our previous conversation was just above in the comments section of the Identification and Intake page of the slifebeyond.blogspot.ca site. I will reply to your question there as well.
I absolutely agree that we need to have a way to assess SLIFE. The root question is whether or not we need to have assessments that assign grade equivalents. It may be that you need to have this for student identification due to funding or program requirements for your jurisdiction. In that case, you will need standardized assessments that assign grade levels.
There is some good advice concerning the use of standardized assessments for identifying SLIFE in the first chapter of "Meeting the Needs of Students With Limited or Interrupted Schooling" by Andrea DeCapua, William Smathers, and Lixing Frank Tang (2009). They also include cautions concerning the use of standardized assessment with SLIFE. You won't find the definition of SLIFE as being "2 years behind in reading and math in the L1" in that work or in other SLIFE literature from DeCapua and Marshall, however. They are more focused on defining SLIFE by the qualities, experiences and values they possess.
Thanks for the heads-up about the math resource - I'll have a look.
Hello, I'm an ELL teacher from Massachusetts. Thanks for the tip for using Math Mammoth. I'm trying to id SLIFEs in not only math but also in their native languages. For language literacy in Spanish, I've given the Quick Phonics Screener with consonant-vowel-consonant words that have meaning in both languages (red, con). Is there a better test out there than my makeshift one? How can I administer it in Portuguese (I don't speak much) and Kreyol (I speak none)? This will be my first year at the high school level.
Thanks again for mentioning my work. By the way, (plug here) I have chapters in two different books coming out soon by Multilingual Matters. They will be on shelves for TESOL and AAAL this Spring.
Yup... if you want to measure previous education, then measure education (e.g math or literacy scores) instead of schooling (e.g. last year of schooling completed or interrupted schooling). I recommend tests of math and native language literacy.
The school system I work for here in Maryland developed math tests for placement of international students. The assumption here is that a student going into 9th grade should have some pre-algebra skills (60% on a comprehensive test of pre-algebra). They also made some tests items for basic and advanced arithmetic (e.g. fractions, decimals). I give students a few basic math problems. If they do well, I give them advanced ones, and then pre-algebra questions.
For measuring Spanish literacy, I worked with some native Spanish speakers on my team to produce a Spanish literacy test that works the same way. It starts out very easy and students work their way up to grade level Spanish. We noticed immediately that students with very low Spanish literacy were learning English much slower.
I suspect that the students with much lower literacy and math can learn English just as fast if given a more appropriate learning experience (e.g. MALP). I've met a lot of people while living overseas who had very low levels of education and literacy but learned English very quickly. People were learning languages successfully long before modern schooling existed. We need to understand how they do it and how we can help them do it.
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