Transdisciplinary Approaches to Bilingual Student Assessment: Creating Authentic Reflections of Meaningful Learning Opportunities

Gort, M. (2008). Transdisciplinary approaches to bilingual student assessment creating authentic reflections of meaningful learning opportunities. In D. M. Moss, T. A. Osborn, & D. Kaufman (Authors), Interdisciplinary education in the age of assessment (pp. 134-154). New York: Routledge.


Summary/Analysis:
This chapter starts with a brief history of assessments that have used to determine English Learners progress in acquiring English.  The author discusses the typical biases found in standardized tests and how they give bilingual students an unfair disadvantage.  The chapter goes on to discuss best practices for assessing bilingual students.  By using a transdisciplinary approach, a students learning style would be considered as well as monitoring learning through multiple measures, instead of a one size fits all standardized test.  


The ideas in this chapter appeal to me, since tomorrow I will once again be administering the CELDT test to my students.  I understand the need for multiple measures, I'm just not sure how realistic the ideas suggested in the chapter would be in the real world.


Quote:
"For bilingual learners, any test in English is, to some unknown degree, a test of English proficiency." (p. 139)