Historical Milestones in the Assessment of English Learners

Abstract

The academic assessment of students, including English learners (ELs), in the United States dates back more than a century. The practice of large-scale assessment began with intelligence testing in the 1910s. Emphasis on intelligence testing quickly shifted to academic achievement testing by the 1930s. ELs remain the fastest-growing subgroup of students in the nation. Much EL student growth has been concentrated in specific states. In 2016, for example, California’s EL population was 20.2 percent, while West Virginia’s was less than 1 percent. During the 1910s intelligence tests were first used for Army job placement and later transitioned into intelligence measurement tools for children in school. Through a series of revisions to the Binet-Simon intelligence scale by Lewis Terman in 1912, the test was renamed the Stanford-Binet scale and was administered to thousands of students in the late 1910s. In early twentieth century, intelligence was primarily viewed as result of heredity, predetermined by genes rather than based on nurture and environment.