Linguistically Equitable Reading Screening: Bias Analyses and Universal Item Design

Session Type: Coordinated Paper Session

Abstract

The majority of US states mandate universal reading screening, which calls for thoughtful solutions to ensure screening remains equitable for the ever-growing bilingual student population. The Multitudes project is developing a free K-1 reading screener, focused on early identification of reading problems in California’s linguistically diverse population. We therefore incorporate multilingual learners throughout the entire assessment development process.
In this session, we describe the development and evaluation of a pilot version of the screener using a suite of existing English reading measures and evaluate it with a focus on linguistic fairness (paper 1). Subsequently, we present the development and evaluation of a suite of English and Spanish tasks, culturally and linguistically tailored to California’s student population. Papers 2 and 3 discuss the development of a sentence repetition and word reading task, respectively, and investigate the roles of language proficiency and linguistic features of the stimuli on item difficulty. Paper 4 provides a novel way of screening Spanish/English bilingual students regardless of their language profile by using conceptual scoring for an expressive vocabulary task. Overall, in this session, we sketch out the process of developing a linguistically equitable reading screener and share valuable insights into appropriate design and analysis considerations.

Sub Unit

• Individual Papers, Innovation Demonstrations, Coordinated Sessions, or Organized Discussions

Session Organizer

• Julian Maximilian Siebert, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Universal Reading Screening for California: Linguistically Sensitive Task Selection and Prediction Evaluation - Julian Maximilian Siebert, Stanford University; Hugh Catts, Florida State University; Yaacov Petscher, FLORIDA CENTER FOR READING RES; Francesca Pei, University of California, San Francisco; Marilu Gorno Tempini, University of California, San Francisco

• Item Difficulty in English/Spanish Sentence Repetition Tasks and Correlations with English Proficiency - Amy Pratt, University of Cincinatti; Javier Jasso, The Ohio State University; Lillian Duran, University of Oregon; Mónica Zegers, University of California, San Francisco; Cengiz Zopluoglu, University of Oregon

• Spanish Word Reading: Considerations for Item Selection, Stimulus Analysis, and Item Difficulty - Mónica Zegers, University of California, San Francisco; Julian Maximilian Siebert, Stanford University; Cengiz Zopluoglu, University of Oregon

• Conceptual Scoring in Universal Screening: An Example Using Expressive Vocabulary - Lillian Duran, University of Oregon; Cengiz Zopluoglu, University of Oregon; Mónica Zegers, University of California, San Francisco; Julian Maximilian Siebert, Stanford University

Discussant

• Ben Domingue, STANFORD UNIVERSITY