[Recent Iranian immigrant and high school student] Hibodi was among several New Haven students who testified before the legislature’s education committee Monday in favor of a bill that would require the state to offer standardized tests like the CAPT and Connecticut Mastery Test in languages other than English. The tests are used to determine which schools are labeled "in need of improvement" under the federal law.
The No Child Left Behind law allows states to test students in their native languages. But Connecticut offers its tests only in English, unlike states such as Texas, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. New Jersey, for example, translates its high school proficiency test into 10 languages, including Vietnamese and Arabic.
State Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg said Monday she is open to exploring the idea of alternate tests, especially in subjects like math or science where a student’s grasp of the English language isn’t being measured.
But she worries about the cost and legal questions in a state where more than 140 different languages are spoken in the public schools.
As well she should be. How many languages should be chosen, and how should they be chosen? At what point does proficiency in English rather than these other languages become mandatory? What does a high school diploma in the U.S. mean if a student doesn't need to be fluent in English to earn it? Does this mean colleges must be required to admit students who do not speak English, simply because their high schools didn't require it for graduation?
On top of these concerns, there are the psychometric issues:
Sternberg explained that creating an alternative test is not simply a matter of translating English words into Spanish. She said pilot test would have to be created and the content must be the same as the English version.
Tranlating (or adapting, as it's often called) tests is not easy, it's not cheap, and it's often not done correctly. The new test - in whatever language - would have to be extensively field-tested in order to ensure that its psychometric properties would be the same as with the English tests. Adaptation is not a simple matter of translating words; there are cultural issues to be considered. Should English test items that contain some cultural context be greatly modified to try to fit the culture of the new language?
It's not hard to find good solid psychometric information on why adapted tests aren't necessarily right for every situation and shouldn't be undertaken lightly. For example, here's one article, by Ronald Hambleton and Liane Patsula in the Association of Test Publishers journal, that begins by debunking five myths about adapting (translating) tests.
Selected quotes:
Sometimes, too, it may be desirable not to adapt a test but rather to require all examinees to take a test in a single language. For example, in the United States, there has been interest in some states in making high school graduation tests available in both English and Spanish. Technically this is possible, but the question of whether or not to make two language versions of a test available depends on many factors including the definition of the construct being measured. Is the language in which performance is to be demonstrated a part of the construct definition or not? In the case of reading, reading in the language of English is almost always part of the construct of interest. Producing a Spanish equivalent version of a reading test in English makes very little sense because inferences of English reading proficiency cannot be made from a test administered in Spanish.
Van de Vijver and Poortinga (1997) make the point that not only should the meaning of a test be consistent across persons within a language group and culture but, that meaning, whatever it is, must be consistent across language groups and cultures. For example, if a test is more speeded in a second language version because of the nature of that language, then the two language versions of the test are not equally valid. We have encountered just such a problem in some German test translations we are currently working on. Quite simply, the German words are longer than English words and take correspondingly longer to read. The result is a slightly more speeded German version of the test. In this instance, the test may be equally valid in each language group and culture, but still not be suitable for cross-cultural comparisons.
In summary, all of the myths can seriously compromise the validity of a test in a second language or cultural group, or negatively influence the validity of adapted tests for use in cross-language comparison studies.
Emphases mine. The article also includes suggestions for making adapted/translated tests work, but are states following these suggestions for high-school exit exams? Are the administrators even aware that such research exists?
Validating adapted tests is very difficult. A high school exit exam is useful if it's a good indication of how well a student has mastered the curriculum, and one validation of those scores might involve a correlation of exit exam performance with some measure of job performance or college performance. If a student is not fluent in English, what's the likelihood that, in the U.S., they'll be fine in the job market, or in college?
The U.S. has always had immigrants in its schools. The U.S. has, traditionally, always impressed upon students in its public schools that, if they manage to accomplish nothing else, they should learn English, or they won't succeed in our society. Giving tests in other languages seems to be a very slippery slope towards setting immigrants up for failure.
Israel Chacaltana, a fourth-grader at New Haven’s Truman School, told lawmakers in his native Spanish that he was a very good student in Peru, but he struggled with the Connecticut Mastery Test and he started to think he was nobody.
"Try as they may, these students are not able to demonstrate on this test the full range of their academic knowledge," said Marlene de Naclerio, who runs New Haven’s bilingual education program. "Why subject our students to practices that can only harm their self-esteem and their love of learning?"
Why subject these students to a teacher who believes that having to learn English is harmful to, or somehow incompatible with, self-esteem and love of learning? What kind of teacher wouldn't explain to this student that he is smart, he just has to learn English in order to be able to use his "full range of academic knowledge" in this country?
Posted by kswygert at March 2, 2004 02:03 PM