We have had so many incredible conversations with three of this field’s experts on evaluations. 60 seconds each. Take your pick.
What are the key things practitioners can do to avoid, reduce, or eliminate disproportionality?
What do we have to think about when we are testing bilingual kids?
How important is understanding socio-economic status (SES) when testing?
To what degree is vocabulary development affected by low socio-economic status (SES)?
What do we do if we think low SES is impacting our testing scores?
Speaking as a consultant of the DELV, how can we use it to better assess children who speak AAE?
What are the key things practitioners can do to avoid, eliminate, or reduce overidentification of children who speak AAE for Special Education?
Written by: Scott Prath
I did not have a chance to attend the seminars you offered. However, the topics addressed are very important. Even though we indicate that no one test or tests tell the entire story, members of the assessment teams in school focus on performance on children with multilingual and multicultural students on “statistical data”. We need to look at the whole child, and their growth over time, if we can. We have to ensure that teaching strategies that are implemented are helping students to learn with greater success- no one method works, as we all know.
Additionally, I would like to add that when we are assessing bilingual students we need to consider the development of each language over time, if applicable. Often times the primary language is not developed because the child does not have a solid foundation in their first language-
We couldn’t have said it better. There is so much to consider outside of the data when we are testing a child in order to make the right call. And the conference starts next week so you can still attend: Diversity Evaluation Conference. The presentations will also be recorded and available inside SLP Impact
Dr. Langdon, Thanks for your valuable comments! You haven’t missed it! Dr. Peña is on this afternoon, Dr. Ortiz tomorrow, and Dr. Wyatt on Thursday. It’s going to be great!