Understanding Science and Language Connections: New Approaches to Assessment with Bilingual Learners

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today's education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students' emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments. Within the context of these workshops, we used discourse analysis to explore how three different groups grappled with the new reform-oriented relationship between science and language: (1) the research team's emergent understandings of how to create improved resources for teachers to better integrate science and language; (2) students' emergent understandings as expressed in their assessment responses; and (3) teachers' emergent understandings of how to integrate science and language in their instruction as expressed in interviews in the teacher writing workshops. Implications for curriculum designers, assessment developers, and professional learning facilitators are discussed.