Developing Sign Language Assessments: Exploring Language Assessment Options for Students Who Are Deaf

• In Event: Innovative Foundation Literacy and Language Assessments

Proposal

Practitioners intervening in early grade reading have increasingly focused on including learners with disabilities in programming and standardized assessments such as EGRA, ASER, and national level exams. While these efforts have proved successful in establishing reading levels for learners who are blind by introducing accommodations such as braille stimuli, the task of adapting these assessments for learners who are deaf and are signers has proven more complex. Learners who are deaf receive bimodal bilingual education, in which their first language is their local sign language and their second language is a written local language. Measuring learners’ lower level and higher-order sign language skills - in addition to their reading skills - is critical for understanding their holistic language and literacy skills and for providing formative feedback to education systems. In most cases, this type of measurement hasn’t been done for these learners, leaving policy makers and education systems unable to determine how much sign language the learners have acquired before implementing a reading intervention.

This presentation will describe the process of developing, adapting and administering sign language subtasks as a part of a standardized reading assessment in three countries. Specifically, this presentation will discuss receptive sign language, expressive sign language, sign language story comprehension, and fingerspelling subtasks (Enns & Hermann, 2011; Rosenberg, Lieberman, Caselli, & Hoffmeister, 2020; Stone, Kartheiser, Hauser, Petitto, & Allen, 2015; Ormel, Giezen, Knoors, Verhoeven, & Gutierrez-Sigut, 2022). The presenters will share results on the relationship between these subtasks and reading skills development, based on the case studies.

In addition to a technical discussion on the adaptation of the subtasks, the presenters will also share contextual considerations and lessons learned through the process of adapting sign language subtasks. These include lessons learned around including Organizations of People with Disabilities and Deaf experts in the process, sign language variations within countries, administration modalities, the use of standardized videos, enumerator selection, and developing subtasks in the absence of sign language curricula.

Finally, the presenters will reflect on how to continue to learn from the evolving international evidence base around best practices for measuring language and literacy skills of learners who are deaf, how to ensure that learnings from sign language assessments are integrated into teacher training and curriculum, and the possible implications for policy makers and education systems.

Authors

• Kristina Solum, School-to-School International

• Aimee Reeves, School-To-School International