Fairness Versus Justice in Language Testing: The Place of English Literacy in the Australian Citizenship Test

McNamara, Tim; Ryan, Kerry A.

doi:10.1080/15434303.2011.565438

Cited by 109 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…The social consequences of this claim are profound, but are unsubstantiated in Flanders -as they are in many other contexts (McNamara & Ryan, 2011). Investigating them requires a perspective that is concerned with imbalances and inequities caused by testing policies.…”

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Universities who base entrance decisions on language test scores implicitly claim that students who pass can cope with the communicative demands of academic studies, and that those who fail are unlikely to be successful (McNamara & Ryan, 2011). The social consequences of this claim are profound, but are unsubstantiated in Flanders -as they are in many other contexts (McNamara & Ryan, 2011).…”

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Post-Messick validity theorists like Kane have emphasized the importance of a test's social consequences, which has inspired discussions about fairness and justice (Davies, 2010;Kane, 2010;Kunnan, 2010;Xi, 2010;McNamara & Ryan, 2011). While there is general agreement that fairness primarily concerns bias and impartiality (McNamara & Ryan, 2011), justice has proven more elusive.…”

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…While there is general agreement that fairness primarily concerns bias and impartiality (McNamara & Ryan, 2011), justice has proven more elusive. Contrary to fairness, which presupposes the existence of a test, justice questions the legitimacy of using a test as a gatekeeper (McNamara & Ryan, 2011) since a test may introduce imbalance or inequity in a larger population (Kunnan, 2000). On this basis, the current paper examines a setting in which one subpopulation (international L2 students) is required to pass a test before being admitted to an institution that is open to others (students with a Flemish secondary school degree).…”

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

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University entrance language tests: A matter of justice

2017

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University entrance language tests are often administered under the assumption that even if language proficiency does not determine academic success, a certain proficiency level is still required. Nevertheless, little research has focused on how well L2 students cope with the linguistic demands of their studies in the first months after passing an entrance test. Even fewer studies have taken a longitudinal perspective.Set in Flanders, Belgium, this study examines the opinions and experiences of 24 university staff members and 31 international L2 students, of whom 20 were tracked longitudinally. Attention is also given to test/retest results, academic score sheets, and class recordings. To investigate the validity of inferences made on the basis of L2 students' scores, Kane's (2013) Interpretation/ Use Argument approach is adopted, and principles from political philosophy are applied to investigate whether a policy that discriminates among students based on language test results can be considered just. It is concluded that the receptive language requirements of university studies exceed the expected B2 level and that the Flemish entrance tests include language tasks that are of little importance for first-year students. Furthermore, some of the students who failed the entrance test actually managed quite well in their studies -a result that entails broad implications concerning validation and justice even outside the study's localized setting.

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Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Validation and Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

University entrance language tests: A matter of justice

2017

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Large‐Scale Assessment

Fox

2013

The Companion to Language Assessment

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Large‐scale language assessment affects the lives of millions of test takers every year. As a means of achieving fairness in large‐scale tests and testing practices, language testers have traditionally focused on uniformity and technical quality, and large‐scale language assessment has increasingly been associated with political, bureaucratic, or accountability agendas. However, some scholars suggest that it can serve pedagogic and learning purposes as well. More recently, considerations of large‐scale language assessment have been shaped by a more critical view of the contexts in which it occurs and of the sociopolitical motives it serves.

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Fairness and Justice in Language Assessment

Kunnan

2013

The Companion to Language Assessment

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The concept of fairness , as related to assessment and assessment practice, has been debated regularly since the late 1980s, but disagreements have regularly surfaced regarding interpretation and scope of the term. Further, researchers have argued that fairness is made up of an incoherent list and practitioners have questioned the need to include fairness as part of the assessment development process. The term justice is rarely mentioned in the assessment literature, although the idea of justice has been discussed by philosophers from ancient times. This chapter attempts to provide principled bases for fairness and justice as applied to the institution of assessment. This is done by applying the idea of fairness as relating to persons—how assessments ought to be fair to test takers—and the idea of justice as relating to institutions—how institutions ought to be just to test takers. Arguments from normative ethics regarding fairness and justice are then discussed in order to provide an appropriate background for the principles of fairness and justice that are proposed and discussed through hypothetical vignettes about pretesting, biased and defective tasks, selecting an assessment, public reasoning, and differential pricing for services. The chapter concludes with how these principles can be used to advance fairness and justice in language assessment.

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Fairness Versus Justice in Language Testing: The Place of English Literacy in the Australian Citizenship Test

Cited by 109 publications

References 36 publications

University entrance language tests: A matter of justice

University entrance language tests: A matter of justice

Large‐Scale Assessment

Fairness and Justice in Language Assessment

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