Assessment Strategies for English-Language Learners

Larry Ferlazzo is an English and social studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif.

This week’s new question-of-the-week is:

What are effective assessment strategies for multilingual learners?

Assessment is a key element of teaching—we need to know where our students are in the learning process, how effective our instructional strategies have been, and if there are additional challenges we need to be aware of as we plan future lessons and student support.

Assessments, however, cannot be used in a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Maximizing ‘Linguistic and Cultural Equity’

Margo Gottlieb, WIDA co-founder and lead developer, introduces assessment as, for, and of learning in her 2016 book, Assessing English Language Learners: Bridges to Equity, and expands on the approaches in subsequent books, chapters, and articles. Her most current publication is Classroom Assessment in Multiple Languages: A Handbook for Teachers (Corwin, 2021):

When thinking about effective assessment strategies for multilingual learners, what if we switched our attention away from school or district scores generated from testing that leave “gaps” in student performance and revisit data through the lens of stakeholders? Let’s start with a series of questions about multilingual learners, our most important stakeholders, to help position their centrality in the assessment process and provide a context for interpreting assessment data.

• What are the languages, cultures, and educational backgrounds of your multilingual learners?
  
• To what extent does your language program leverage your multilingual learners’ languages and cultures in curriculum and instruction?
  
• To what extent do your multilingual learners connect their personal interests and their home/community life to school?

The first step in planning classroom assessment is to determine its purpose. How might you prioritize the primary reasons for assessing multilingual learners in one or more languages?

• Do you want to get a pulse on multilingual learners’ thinking, how they are feeling, and their self-reflection on learning? Being more inclusive of students’ views and encouraging student agency are features of assessment as learning.
  
• Do you want to provide feedback to multilingual learners to move their learning forward? Acting on insight from the interaction between students and teachers during instruction reflects assessment for learning.
  
• Do you want to contribute to programmatic or schoolwide accountability? Using student projects, performances, and products, along with uniform criteria for success formulated by teachers with input from students, are representations of assessment of learning.

Now that you have a purpose and a corresponding approach to assessment in mind, let’s explore their associated effective strategies.

Assessment as learning as a classroom practice is a student-driven activity that broadcasts multilingual learners’ voice, empowerment, and identity. Assessment as learning can occur face to face or online when multilingual learners interact with their peers in the language(s) of their choice to:

• explore topics or issues of mutual interest
  
• contribute to crafting classroom activities or tasks
  
• engage in self- and peer assessment
  
• pursue learning from their own perspectives
  
• select preferred mode(s) of communication (e.g., oral, written, graphic, visual) for processing information and expressing learning.

Assessment for learning might begin with teacher and student conversations leading to collaboration in making mutually agreed upon learning goals. Both are keenly aware of where multilingual learners are in their learning that is anchored to grade-level academic content and language proficiency/development standards. In assessment for learning, multilingual learners interact with their teachers in English or their shared language(s) to:

• co-construct criteria for success and types of acceptable evidence for their work
  
• apply criteria for success to give criterion-referenced feedback
  
• plan differentiated instruction for content and language learning
  
• give feedback in real time to student performance or needs.

Assessment of learning at a classroom level is shaped by teachers, individually or as a department or grade-level team, with input from students. It represents what students have accomplished at the culmination of a period of instruction, such as a unit of learning. Assessment of learning is geared to determining student growth over time and centers on collaboration among teachers with support of school or district leaders to:

• match evidence for assessment with learning targets
  
• document extent of meeting standards for units of learning
  
• share of learning for products, performances, or projects
  
• guide student production of capstone projects or portfolios

Together, assessment as, for, and of learning offers a comprehensive system that optimizes opportunities for multilingual learners to participate as educators strive to maximize linguistic and cultural equity for their students.