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Progress & Updates

The Use and Validity of Home Language Surveys in State English Language Proficiency Assessment Systems

This paper is focused on the different Home Language Surveys (HLS) used across states as a means of initially identifying those students who may be eligible for language services. It grew out of conversations that took place at EVEA project meetings in January 2010, when a number of the project states recognized that the role of an HLS in their ELPA systems necessitated its further scrutiny as part of the validation process. Their main concern was a lack of evidence for the validity of an HLS as an initial identifying instrument.

Working to address this common validity concern across the five project states is exactly the kind of collaborative activity EVEA set out to support. We expect to produce more white papers of this kind in the future, as states identify additional common validity concerns with subsequent aspects of their ELPA systems (e.g., impact of exit criteria from English language services).

edCount Associates Author Guide to Serving English Learners

edCount founder and president Ellen Forte and policy associate Molly Faulkner-Bond have coauthored a new resource manual about serving English learners (ELs) in public schools. The book, entitled The Administrator’s Guide to Federal Programs for English Learners was released by Thompson Publishing on May 5 and offers a comprehensive discussion of how states, districts, schools and individuals can serve the nation’s growing population of ELs.

The Administrator’s Guide, written for a broad audience ranging from classroom teachers to state program directors, addresses the full range of policies that affect ELs, including requirements and opportunities stemming from Title I, Title II, Title III, Title VII, and the Civil Rights Act. Chapters on topics ranging from EL identification to equitable services for private school students provide practitioners with straight forward explanations of their responsibilities, as well as practical advice about how to meet these in a variety of different organizational, geographical, and financial settings.
In addition, the book includes 50-pages of ‘Best Practices’ and summative checklists, synthesizing themes and practices from across chapters for quick reference. Extensive appendices also include a compendium of documents and guidance about ELs produced by a number of different programs and offices within the U.S. Department of Education.
edCount associates Dr. Sara Waring, Dr. Diane Staehr Fenner, and Laura Kuti all served as contributors to the book, lending content expertise and practical guidance based on their experiences as classroom teachers, district administrators, and state administrators.

The Administrator’s Guide to Federal Programs for English Learners is available for order now through Thompson publishing, and is eligible for purchase using federal dollars. For more information, please visit www.thompson.com/englishlearners, or contact Thompson national sales representative Matt Hartzog at 800-477-5922.

January 14-15, 2010

The EVEA project participants met in person for the first time at a two-day expert panel meeting in Phoenix, AZ. Priorities for this meeting included:

to allow project members to meet and collaborate in person (including for states to meet their research partners in person for the first time);
to give state representatives more prolonged access to the project’s expert panelists as a resource;
to allow states to learn more about the background and priorities of other states and possibly identify shared research interests (for collaboration on instruments and study design later on);
to continue work on the project’s common interpretive argument (CIA); and
to begin work on state-level individual interpretive arguments.

On the first day, states each presented information about their ELL population, their English language proficiency assessment (ELPA), and their tentative research priorities. Expert panelists responded to each presentation with observations, guidance, suggestions and feedback to support states’ ongoing efforts. The day ended with Co-Principal Investigators Marianne Perie (Center for Assessment) and Ellen Forte (edCount) recapping and synthesizing shared priorities and themes they had heard across multiple states over the course of the day.

The meeting’s second day was dedicated to work on the states’ interpretive arguments. Three expert panelists (Scott Marion, Center for Assessment; Derek Briggs, University of Colorado Boulder; and Katherine Ryan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) gave short presentations on how states might successfully approach their development of an interpretive argument. Following these, each state was paired with one validity expert, one language acquisition expert, their research partner, and a scribe; these groups began to develop their arguments and hone in their most critical research foci. Each group shared its progress afterwards, to allow states to hear one another’s priorities and thoughts, and to allow the panelists to provide one last round of feedback.

Following this meeting, states will continue to work with their research partners to finish building their individual interpretive arguments, and may communicate with expert panelists as needed. According to the EVEA project timeline, the goal is to complete work on interpretive arguments by approximately April 2010, shifting focus thereafter to the design and development of research instruments and protocols to test critical assumptions within these final arguments. States with shared or similar research priorities may choose to collaborate on some of these future efforts. The next project wide meeting will take place via WebEx in June 2010.

For more detailed information about our expert panelists and their background, please refer to the Expert Panelists section under Partners on this website.