Assessment by Pierce

This article covers assessment issues for English Language learners (ELL). It ranges from political influences, ways to help the students for assessments, issues in assessments (purpose, validity, reliability, and biases), language support programs for assessments, and identification of five fundamental assumptions and operations for fair and accurate testing of ELL’s.

The article writes, “language minority students need to have attained a level of literacy that allows them to show their understanding on a standardized test in English…students with no proficiency…will take from two to four years to reach readiness to take norm-referenced tests (p.314). In Ayaprun Elitnaurvik, our students begin taking state assessments in third grade. By that time, they’ve only been taught in English for 1/2 a day, and is their first year of instruction in English. How do we expect these students to be proficient when this is their first year of being taught in English? The NCLB act doesn’t take into consideration of how long the students were taught before they take the assessments. I am not familiar of the types of questions written in their assessments. I assume the students were taught test taking strategies before they take the assessments.
Our third graders score low in their assessments, but by sixth grade they show a huge improvement. For the last two years we’ve met AYP, but not the last year. Last year our school had teacher turn over and positions were not filled in the beginning of the year. This is one of the problems schools in Rural Alaska face. Teachers come into LKSD not being familiar to the socioculture of the area, and each year students would have different teachers. Many of the teachers teach subjects that are not part of their expertise, but LKSD offers Math through Polycoms to the other schools in the district.

Since NCLB has became a law, our immersion school began teaching English Language Development (ELD) starting in Kindergarten. Kindergarteners and first graders receive a half hour of ELD, but don’t involve teaching actual reading. The students are taught oral skills through songs and chants. This is probably the beginning where they are learning English comprehension, and to learn “standard” English.

In our school, the staffs are encouraged to peer coach and to meet weekly to review how we can better teach our students. At these meetings, we are encouraged to read and do a self-study in good teaching. In our teacher in-services, we review the data from the State assessment, and find where we can increase our instruction based on the data. This was also mentioned in the article in page 352 where teachers should be given time to work together on “how to use curriculum and assessments.