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Objectives
This paper addresses three interrelated objectives to (1) identify teacher expectations of multilingual students’ science achievement compared to speakers of the language of schooling (LOS); (2) assess the extent to which teacher expectations of students’ science achievement are accurate predictions of students’ results on a science test; (3) explain the difference between the accuracy of teacher expectations of multilingual students compared to the accuracy of teacher expectations of first language (L1) speakers in order to address the guiding research question: Is the use of a bilingual test is connected to discrepancies in teacher expectations? based on a study conducted in the Flemish region of Belgium.
Theoretical framework
Assessment is a powerful tool for both teachers and students to get more insight into students’ competencies. However, tests often misrepresent the understanding of multilingual learners. Shohamy (2011) explains how students who were schooled in their home countries and participated in assessment procedures in the country they migrated to, often failed to demonstrate their actual content knowledge because they did not (fully) understand the question or were unable to express their content knowledge in a sufficient way. Multilingual students with higher isolated proficiency levels in the LOS tend to perform better on content-related tests such as mathematics or science (Abedi, 2017; Menken & Shohamy, 2015). Yet if their multilingualism is positioned as prohibiting students from demonstrating their knowledge, then this poses a severe threat to the validity of the test use (Wolf, Kao, Rivera, & Chang, 2012). The inability to demonstrate skills and knowledge often leads to wrong conclusions about students’ understandings (Shohamy, 2011), which can have severe consequences. Poor school results can lead to diminished chances in future life choices (Wigglesworth, Simpson, & Loakes, 2011), because assessments influence selection and placement decisions (Tierney, 2013).
Data sources/methods
In this study, we investigate whether multilingual assessment holds the potential to adjust teacher expectations of multilingual students. We discuss a randomized experiment in which 1154 Flemish students in fifth grade (age 9 to 12) were randomly assigned to one of four test conditions: (1) a bilingual test, (2) a bilingual test with additional read-aloud accommodation in both the LOS and the L1, (3) a monolingual test with read-aloud accommodation in the language of schooling, and (4) a control condition without accommodations. Teachers were asked how well they expected their students to perform on a science test. By using Chi-square tests, we examine the accuracy of teacher expectations and investigate whether this differs according to students' linguistic background and test accommodations.
Findings/scholarly significance
The results suggest that when multilingual students use read-aloud accommodations in their L1, they more often tend to do better than expected by their teachers. The findings from our study show that linguistic barriers to showcasing content knowledge may especially play a role in creating erroneous expectations among teachers. In a context such as Flanders where teacher judgments have strong consequences for referral and transition advice, the importance of so-called “assessment literacy” among teachers becomes all the more important.