Chapter 15 - Equitable Assessment for Hearing and Deaf English Language Learners: An Investigation of the Impact of Verbal Load on PASS Processes

Abstract

In both research and practice, there are long-standing concerns regarding how to ensure the valid and equitable assessment of English language learners (ELLs) and students from nonmainstream backgrounds (Solano-Flores, & Trumbull, 2003). Most conventional measures of cognitive processing are language-laden and tend to confound language proficiency with cognitive abilities. When such assessments are used with ELLs, these students may be misidentified as learning disabled and inappropriately placed in special education programs. Alternative assessments, such as nonverbal measures of intelligence, do not measure as wide a range of abilities as established intelligence tests and, as a result, are not strong predictors of academic performance. Therefore, results from nonverbal measures should not be used as substitutes for conventional measures when making high stakes classification and placement decisions for limited language proficiency ELLs. Because the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS; Das, Naglieri, & Kirby, 1994) framework has been demonstrated to be a valid predictor of academic achievement (see Kroesbergen, Van Luit, & van Viersen, this volume), we speculated that low verbal load assessments that correspond to the PASS framework may provide more valid results for ELLs and thereby be more appropriate for use with limited proficiency ELLs than conventional and nonverbal measures of cognitive functioning. In this chapter, we report on the development of a computerized cognitive assessment battery (CCAB) designed to examine the impact of verbal load on PASS processes. To ensure that the computerized tasks were functioning correctly, we initially pilot tested the tasks with three groups of university students (hearing ELL, deaf ELL, and a monolingual control group) in Phase 1 of the study. In Phase 2, the CCAB was piloted with a small sample of Grade 3 students (hearing ELL, deaf ELL, and monolingual control groups). Although the empirical results from this small-scale pilot study were inconclusive, it is our hope that with further refinement and pilot testing of low load CCAB measures, the CCAB will offer a more equitable means of assessing low proficiency hearing and deaf ELLs in the future.