ABSTRACT
Communicating test results in score reports is one of the critical components of large-scale educational assessments, including English Language Proficiency (ELP) assessments. The development of adequate score reports entails technical as well as practical considerations impacting the test design. Score reports should be easily understood by the intended audiences and provide technically accurate information. Key psychometric issues must be thoroughly considered in generating reliable and meaningful test scores in the reports. In this chapter, authors discuss how they develop technically sound and practically useful score reports for a K–12 ELP assessment with an emphasis on a psychometric perspective, which is a general issue for newly developed assessments in K–12 contexts. The chapter focuses on two empirical psychometric analyses used to address the principal issues of score reporting: (a) dimensionality analyses to evaluate the internal test structure of four language skills as well as the overall ELP construct and (b) vertical scaling analyses (that yield score scales spanning from kindergarten through grade 12) that are used to monitor the students’ annual ELP progress.
