Assessing English Learners’ Progress: A Longitudinal Examination of a Standards-Based Classroom Assessment Based on Teacher Judgements

Lorena M. Llosa

Currently, many accountability systems not only focus on student achievement or mastery of standards, but also on the amount of progress students make each year. Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), for example, requires states and school districts to show annual increases in the number and percentage of students who become proficient in English, as well as in the number and percentage of students who make progress toward that goal. Monitoring progress is also becoming increasingly important in classroom formative assessment, since a reliable assessment of progress can inform teacher instruction and appropriate interventions. But in order to interpret changes in assessment results from one year to the next as reflecting differences in underlying ability rather than as variations in the measurement, the assessments used should be measuring the same constructs over time. Gathering evidence of an assessment’s longitudinal invariance is particularly important when the assessments used are based on teacher judgments since teacher judgments are often viewed as inconsistent, and different teachers may be involved each year. This study will determine the extent to which a standards-based classroom assessment based on teacher judgments measures English proficiency consistently over time by examining its longitudinal invariance using confirmatory factor analysis.

About Lorena M. Llosa

Dr. Llosa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her interests include language assessment, second and foreign language teaching and learning, and program evaluation. Prior to joining New York University she worked as a research analyst for the Los Angeles Unified School District where she directed a large scale evaluation of a computer-based literacy program. She also served as a research analyst at the Center for the Study of Evaluation/CRESST at UCLA where she worked on the development of performance assessments in English and Spanish. Her current research projects address validity issues related to the use of standards-based classroom assessments of English proficiency in large urban school districts, the development of a diagnostic assessment of high school students’ academic writing, and the testing and placement of language minority students in California’s community colleges. Dr. Llosa received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles.