Becoming more literate about assessment literacy

Abstract

Recent research regarding internationalized higher education has recognized that although English is commonly used as the medium of instruction, teachers and students are multilingual. Despite this, multilingual students’ disciplinary literacy and content knowledge, which often develops in more than one language, tends to be assessed only in English. Although there have been calls to reconceptualize content assessment practices to cater to the students’ multilingual needs, research on multilingual assessment practices in tertiary education contexts remains sporadic and scattered. Findings from previous literature suggest that monolingual assessment of content knowledge practices are maintained because of a lack of relevant multilingual assessment instruments, theoretical models, as well as teacher training and resources. Moreover, despite the calls for content specialists to assess languages in an integrated manner, this integration has been developed more theoretically than in practice. In this paper, we argue that these findings point to a lack of understanding of how multilingual communication about content functions in terms of current frameworks for language (and content) assessment literacy (Dimova & Kling, 2022). Language assessment literacy refers to the skills, knowledge, methods, techniques and principles needed by various stakeholders in language assessment to design and carry out effective assessment tasks and to make informed decisions based on assessment data. We thus propose further development of integrated assessment literacy models to reflect the need for an improved understanding of the integration of multilingualism and content in the assessment process.