The impact of language proficiency on complex performance assessments: Examining linguistic accommodation strategies for English language learners

Despite the promise of performance assessments in contributing to positive changes in instruction and assessment, more studies are needed that examine possible language biases that arise when more complex understanding is the focus of the assessment. The central focus of this study was to investigate the impact of students' language background on complex performance assessments. An additional aim was to explore accommodation strategies to assess subject matter understanding of English language learners (ELLs) by manipulating both the reception and response modes of cognitively complex performance assessments. Accommodations to the reception mode involved linguistic modifications to a written history explanation task based on the content understanding assessment model developed by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. Accommodations to the response mode involved the use of a less discourse-dependent task: the construction of knowledge maps that are designed to graphically depict a student's knowledge in a given domain and are considered less linguistically demanding. Twelve teachers and over 800 7th-grade students participated in this study. The results indicate that ELLs' content understanding may be underestimated by complex performance assessments. In addition, the precise level of a student's English proficiency was found to be useful in determining the most appropriate linguistic accommodation for ELLs. Assessment and instruction implications are discussed.