Conduct a Psychometric Analysis and Validation Study for an Assessment of English Language Learners

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Client: 

National Geographic School Publishing

The Challenge: 

 A growing number of students speak a language other than English as their primary language.  This increase combined with federal testing requirements has led to a rise in the assessment of English Language Learners.  SEG’s Client, a provider of English language instruction and assessment, saw this build up in ELL assessment and asked SEG to help develop sound assessments for benchmarking and end of course assessment. They needed to ensure that the tests were psychometrically sound and that the forms were both valid and statistically parallel.  They called upon SEG to conduct a psychometric study of the assessment.

The Solution: 

SEG conducted a psychometric analysis of the measures developed and conducted a validity study. Using both classical and Item Response Theory, SEG evaluated test and item performance. SEG calibrated the bank of test items using IRT and created multiple parallel forms for operational use.

In order to validate the assessments, SEG conducted a construct validity study; the new measures were compared to established standardized measures and were factor analyzed to evaluate the internal consistency of the tests.