How to Ensure Fairness for Linguistically Diverse Students in Large-Scale Educational Assessments

Validity. Construct relevance. Reliability. Fairness. Score comparability. For the sake of all stakeholders and for the sake of fair play, this is what every large-scale educational assessment for a linguistically and culturally diverse student population needs to achieve. But how can existing tests be successfully adapted for this purpose?

The road map lies within the International Test Commission’s “ITC Guidelines for the Large-Scale Assessment of Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Populations,” strategically combined with rigorous, iterative processes.

In previous blog posts we discussed the value of the International Test Commission’s “ITC Guidelines for Translating and Adapting Tests” and how we use it as a foundation for adapting high-stakes assessments in fields like education, human resources and health. But today I’d like to turn our attention to the “ITC Guidelines for the Large-Scale Assessment of Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Populations.”

Published in 2018, these guidelines primarily apply to the development, adaptation, scoring and administration of large-scale educational assessments for linguistically and culturally diverse student populations.

Due to the conditions of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous countries and/or immigration patterns, the language of educational instruction may not be the language that a student learned at home. Ideally, the appropriate language to test a student in should be individually determined in order to most accurately assess each student’s knowledge. Some students may benefit most from being tested in their home language, other students may benefit most from being tested in the language of instruction and still other students may benefit most from being tested with bilingual accommodations, such as glossaries and dictionaries.

Yet, a meaningful adaptation of an existing assessment can be the best chance of educational success for many students who test best in their home language. The keys to this adaptation include: taking various linguistic and cultural differences between the source and target languages into account, considering cultural aspects for test components, adapting item language when needed as long as it doesn’t change the test construct, not increasing or decreasing the level of difficulty or incorporating new associations, taking differentials into account to avoid instrument bias and ensuring readability for all linguistic groups. But not only that.

We’ve found that the successful adaptation of an assessment requires:

• An expert team, including qualified translators, linguists, subject matter experts, psychometricians and project managers,
• Appropriate support resources, such as terms glossaries and style guides, and
• A rigorous, iterative workflow with validation and quality assurance steps built in.

A framework like the “ITC Guidelines for the Large-Scale Assessment of Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Populations,” combined with the right (defensible) processes and ample adaptation experience, allow stakeholders to have complete confidence in the adapted educational assessment and, in turn, in the scores that it produces.

Adaptation Experts

High-stakes assessments are our specialty.

Certified for ISO 9001, Responsive Translation provides a range of foreign-language services, including translation, adaptation, validation and review, for companies like NWEA, Pearson, ACT and Questar. Why not your organization too?

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