I found a lot of food for thought in this week’s reading
from Drummond and Jones (2010). As I am
about to take a Multicultural Issues in Counseling class beginning next week, I
thought it was somewhat ironic that this week’s chapter was entitled “Assessment
Issues with Diverse Populations.” I
would say that the main idea of this chapter was that test administrators must
make sure that they use assessments that are appropriate for use with the
students who they plan to assess.
Drummond and Jones (2010) state the need to “make sure instrument’s norm
groups are appropriate for examinees from different racial, ethnic, or
linguistic backgrounds” (p. 328). To
this end, they also stress the need to assess the acculturation of students who
will be assessed. A third-generation Hispanic
student, for example, might identify more with the dominant Anglo-American
culture than with their family’s culture of origin. If this was the case, the student’s worldview
might be significantly different from what one might traditionally expect of
Hispanics.
Another
issue to consider when testing students coming from other countries is that of
their grasp of the English language. It
would be inappropriate, for instance, to assess a student’s intelligence using
a test that is only offered in English, if the student had a limited
understanding of English. Invalid
results and interpretations would be gleaned from such a practice. Drummond and Jones (2010) suggest that “test
users should not judge English-language proficiency on the basis of test
information alone, as many language skills are not adequately measured by
multiple-choice examinations” (p. 332).
When I was learning Spanish in high school, for example, most of my
examinations were conducted through writing.
I usually did pretty well with those tests. However, the true test came when I was later
forced to engage in verbal conversations first with my college professor and
later with native Spanish-speakers in Bolivia.
I think that all of us understand that there is a difference between how
we write and how we speak any language.
To assess only one of those areas (e.g., written) would give an
incomplete picture of a person’s true ability to understand and express
themselves in that language.
Another
area that I could identify with in this week’s reading was the discussion on
test-taker factors that can impact assessment results. Of particular interest to me was the topic of
anxiety and motivation. This week, some
of my students have started taking the Keystone Exams. I had one student tell me yesterday that he
didn’t even attempt to answer the open-ended questions because he was afraid
that he would not answer correctly. What
he probably didn’t really consider was the fact that by choosing not to answer
the open-ended questions at all, he was guaranteeing that his answers would be
incorrect! One of the things that scares
me about high-stakes standardized tests, such as the Keystones, is that the
people who are scoring the assessments can’t account for why a student might
have scored the way that they did, and the impact of low-scores on such tests
often affects more people than just the student receiving the score. For instance, my student will probably fail
his English exam due to either test anxiety or lack of motivation or some
combination of those two factors. It is
possible that he actually knows the material and just didn’t feel like working
hard enough to attempt to answer the questions, and it is also possible that he
was so frightened by the potential impact of a low test score that he became
paralyzed, so to speak. It is also
possible that he really didn’t know the material. Whatever the case may be, only my student
knows why he performed the way he did, but his knowledge of why he performed this
way is most likely not enough to get him the help he may need. This is yet another example of how important
it is to base decisions about the services a student may need on more than one
assessment score.
Reference
Drummond, R.J.
& Jones, K. (2010). Assessment
procedures for counselors and helping professionals ( 7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
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