Crossroads: The Psychology of Immigration in the New Century

may inappropriately pathologize their behavior because they
misunderstand that these students are behaving according to
the norms of their heritage culture (Chamberlain, 2005). At
the same time, some children who need such services do not
receive them because valid assessment instruments do not
exist in most immigrant languages.
Teachers and psychologists have limited tools at their disposal
to accurately assess immigrant children from a variety of
cultural and language groups. Academic tests commonly
used in the special education referral process tend to be
socially, economically, and culturally bound toward a White,
American, middle-class upbringing (Agbenyega & Jiggetts,
1999). While several standardized tests have been used to
screen immigrant children (Birman & Chan, 2008), almost
all have been adapted from measures developed for U.S. and
European populations or refugee adults (Birman & Chan,
2008). The high-stakes testing, national education reform
environment placed pressure on many U.S. school districts
to reclassify ELL students as fluent English proficient (FEP)
and to increase their academic achievement in subject area
content (Lesaux, 2006). It
is important to remember
that the classification of
ELL is a temporary one, and
states are only required to
monitor ELL progress for
2 years after reclassification
as FEP (reclassification to
FEP varies from state to
state and from district to
district). Furthermore, there
is a significant percentage
of children who live with parents or caretakers who speak a
language other than English at home who are not classified as
ELLs (Lesaux, 2006).
Much of the field of psychoeducational testing and scoring
is plagued by the challenge of differentiating between
measurement error (i.e., examinees’ observed test scores and
their true scores) and error attributable to the interaction
between the learner’s characteristics (e.g., language,
acculturation, and socioeconomic status) and learning
conditions (e.g., school district, bilingual vs. full-immersion
program, and lack of appropriate instruction) (Lesaux, 2006;
Solano-Flores, 2008; see Ortiz, 2011, for an innovative
strategy for dealing with this assessment challenge). This
inability to disentangle learning characteristics from learning
conditions and their interactions is a problem when
The high-stakes testing, national education
reform environment placed pressure on
many U.S. school districts to reclassify
ELL students as fluent English proficient
. . . and to increase their academic
achievement in subject area content.
Assessment With Immigrant-Origin Adults and Children
diagnosing learning disabilities in ELL students. The past
15 years of research on assessing learning disabilities with
native English speakers have been turbulent ones involving
definitional issues and a lack of consensus on a valid and
reliable model of identification of learning disabilities.
Researchers propose that to establish a valid model of
identification for English language learning and learning
disability, four important changes need to take place:
• Development of a single, operational definition of ELL.
• Better understanding of the normative developmental
trajectories of all ELLs, with or without learning
difficulties (Lesaux, 2006).
• Better understanding of longitudinal normative
developmental trajectories of language and literacy skills
and the influence of instruction and demographics on
these trajectories over time.
• Consideration of heterogeneity of immigrant
communities by disaggregating factors such as culture
and language of origin,
content learned in country of
origin, socioeconomic status
(pre- and postmigration), and
ability to negotiate language
development between the
two languages (Lesaux, 2006).
While technical issues
clearly contribute to cultural
fairness in testing, some have
argued that fairness in testing
and assessment “is fundamentally a sociocultural, rather
than a technical issue” (Stobart, 2005, p. 275). To assure
valid measures and avoid misdiagnoses of ELL students,
immigrant groups, and racial/ethnic minority groups, our
field must seriously consider revising testing and assessment
practices. Further, clinicians and practitioners need to be
provided significant training in multiculturalism. If testing
and assessment are to be fair, then the issue of one group’s
performing differently from another cannot be resolved
simply at a quantitative level.
Realistically, in the U.S. context, it is unlikely that
completely valid assessments will be available in any
language other than English (Ortiz, 2008a). Even for
the most frequently encountered non-English-speaking
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