Assessment of Bilinguals: Don’t Go NUTS!

For a long time, many of us have worked on development of better assessment methods for bilingual children. We know that many of the measures normed for monolinguals are not appropriate for bilinguals. We know that translated measures can lose their psychometric properties because difficulty may shift in translation. But, in the last 20 years there have been more measures and procedures that are validated for Spanish-English bilinguals. Work on other language pairs is emerging as well, but right now the majority of available measures focus on Spanish-English.

Advertisement

We Can’t WAIT!

There’s been a lot of discussion concerning COVID19 and schooling from home. In the special education domain, at least in speech-language pathology, we seem to be all over the place. Not that it’s easy it’s not. But, I hear a lot of comments and reports that school districts are suspending special education testing:

• till schools open again
• because standardized tests aren’t standardized for on-line administration
• because we’re not comfortable
• because we think that it can’t be valid

Do bilinguals have to be tested in both languages?

Yes, no, maybe, it depends. 

Doing the right thing

I belong to a Facebook group SLPs for Evidence Based Practice. There is frequent discussion of what works and what doesn’t in intervention and in assessment. My work has often focused on assessment and assessment practices. And, I have to say that it is frustrating to find that something does (or doesn’t) work but that clinical practices take so long to change. So, I wonder what is our obligation in the field to be aware of the evidence? And what is our obligation to make changes in our practices?

Independent Research using the BESA

My collaborators and I did a number of studies of morphosyntax, semantics, phonology and pragmatics that informed development of the final version of the BESA. We’ve since done other studies using the BESA as an indicator of language impairment or phonological impairment. In addition, it is important to have independent studies of the BESA that evaluate its effectiveness. There are a few studies so far that use the BESA, and I hope soon there will be more. Here is what I think is only a partial list: 

BESA: Content validity

Last month I posted saying I was working on the validity analyses for the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA) that is hopefully soon to be published and available for clinicians. Today, I’ll tell you a little about the results. As many of you know, a number of years ago we (Vera Gutierrez-Clellen, Aquiles Iglesias, and I) got an NIH contract to explore typical and atypical speech and language development in Spanish-English bilingual children. Brian Goldstein and Lisa Bedore joined our team about a year later. The results of the 7 year project were to have a measure that would identify bilingual children with language impairment and phonological impairment.

Why Do We Test Bilinguals?

One of the themes that ran throughout all the presentations at the workshop was to know why we’re testing. And thus, to know why a given test is being developed (or selected). It’s important to know the purpose of testing in the first place. So, what are reasons people test bilinguals? What is it we need to know; and for what purpose?