English Learners and Constructed-Response Science Test Items Challenges and Opportunities

ABSTRACT

This article reports on two quantitative studies of English learners’ (ELs) interactions with constructed-response items from a Grade 5 state science test. Study 1 investigated the relationships between the constructed-response item-level variables of English Reading Demand, English Writing Demand, and Background Knowledge Demand and the performance of ELs vs. non-ELs on those items. English Writing Demand was the strongest predictor of Differential Item Functioning favoring non-ELs over ELs for constructed-response items. In Study 2, we investigated the student-level variable of English language proficiency level and found that lower English language proficiency was related to greatly increased odds of omitting a response to a constructed-response item, even when controlling for science proficiency. These findings challenge the validity of scores on constructed-response test items as measures of ELs’ science proficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• Constructed Response
• Large-scale Assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ WIDA, housed at the University of Wisconsin, is a consortium of states dedicated to the design and implementation of high standards and equitable educational opportunities for English language learners (https://wida.wisc.edu/).

² In fact, if we were to use only the ACCESS group (Low and Mid-High) as a predictor in the multinomial logistic regression (i.e., exclude the MC raw score), then the relative risk estimates would be the same as the odds ratio computed using the frequencies from Table 8.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences [R305A150218]