Research indicates that the performance-gap between English Language Learners (ELLs) and their non-ELL peers is partly due to ELLs' difficulty in understanding assessment language. Accommodations have been shown to narrow this performance-gap, but many accommodations studies have not used a randomized design and are based on relatively small…

Notwithstanding the introduction of education multilingual policies worldwide, testing and assessment procedures still rely almost exclusively on the monolingual construct. This paper describes a study, part of a larger project fostering a new multilingual education policy in Israeli schools, exploring bi/multilingual assessment. It included two…

This study is part of a larger effort to investigate linguistic features of assessment items that might explain differential performance of English learners on science assessments. An analysis of a large set of multiple-choice items suggested two features that held promise in reducing the performance gap: the presence of contrast words and the…