ABSTRACT
The need to include more and different populations in state assessment has spurred innovative psychometric thinking. Other chapters in this book discuss ways to assess more special education students by expanding the range of measurement. This chapter is about using translated mathematics tests to extend the assessment system to more English-language learners (ELLs). It addresses the technical problem of putting different language versions of a test on the same scale. The use of translated tests is not unique to education. Multilingual tests are widely used in technical certification and for armed forces and civil services exams in countries with more than one official language. Many recent advances in crosslanguage testing have arisen from the globalization of business and technology. Nevertheless, problems of creating equivalent tests on a common scale are not, as yet, entirely solved. This chapter discusses some of these issues and reports Oregon’s efforts to grapple with them.
