The Affordances of Analytically Scoring Multilingual Student Writing (Poster 11)

• In Event: Friday Poster Session 4:55
  In Invited Poster Session: 2024 AERA Undergraduate Fellows Research Poster Fair

Abstract

The study proposes an analytic approach to assessing writing that can measure English Learners’ (EL) emerging disciplinary thinking independent of their command of academic English. By doing so, we aim to provide an equitable assessment practice to address issues with problematic writing assessment systems that may overlook EL’s complex thinking capacities. The purpose of this study is to examine how multilingual students show proficiency and growth in historical thinking and academic English of source-based writing skills in history. We examined 195 linguistically diverse secondary students’ source-based argumentative writing of causal analysis using multiple sources on activism of historically marginalized U.S. groups in the U.S. We used an analytic coding scheme to measure discrete aspects of students’ writing related to their historical thinking (i.e., sourcing, evidence, and reasoning) and skills in academic English (i.e., sentence fluency, diction, and command of conventions). MANCOVA was conducted to see whether there are differences of outcomes in aspects of historical thinking and academic English skills for multilingual students at pre-test and their writing growth from fall to spring. Preliminary data analysis showed ELs’ pre-test scores in historical thinking and academic language were significantly lower than their English-proficient peers across all six components. However, post-test results showed ELs’ growth in these skills similarly matched the rates of English-fluent peers with proper writing instruction. With these findings, implications are discussed in terms of potential use of analytic coding to highlight EL’s disciplinary thinking skills that might be overlooked when writing is scored holistically and the capability of ELs to
improve their historical thinking and academic language skills. Altogether, the study hopes to help support EL’s students’ growth in disciplinary writing by facilitating more strength-based responsive instruction and assessment.

Author

• Jacqueline Pham, University of California - Irvine