A new publication from CAL’s Keira Ballantyne, Amy Simpson, Brittney York, and Ivanna Mann Thrower Anderson from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction on the Multilingual Multimodal Science Inventory (M2-Si) project.
In the United States, there are more than 5 million students nationwide who receive English language acquisition support while still working to maintain their grade-level content knowledge. In the state of North Carolina (NC), there are more than 120,000 such students (U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition, 2025). These children come to the classroom with linguistic assets. Their emergent multilingualism and their ability to navigate multiple cultural contexts give them a head start toward bilingualism and biliteracy. Despite these assets, students who are not yet proficient in English are often evaluated and measured in English only. Researchers have expressed concerns that by testing students in English only, standardized assessments may not measure the full extent of students’ ability (Working Group on ELL Policy, 2011, 2015; Menken, 2008; Robinson-Cimpian et al., 2016).
While a number of researchers (see e.g., Chalhoub-Deville, 2016; Shohamy, 2022) have discussed the possibility of allowing for students to participate in testing multilingually, there are some practical barriers in play. One situation in which these practical barriers may be reduced is in the context of formative or classroom assessment, which typically does not require such strict adherence to identical processes in test administration (Lopez et al., 2017). Our research explores the feasibility of an approach to assessment that expands the notion of the expressive repertoire of assessment, including students’ multilingual and multimodal expressive repertoire.
We situate our inquiry in the realm of late elementary school science education. Science lends itself particularly well as a discipline to test multilingual and multimodal applications. The practices of scientific sense-making encoded in educational standards, such as developing and using models, or analyzing and interpreting data, easily support multimodal experiences and expression. In addition, there is a clear need for enhancements in science education for the population of multilingual learners. Multilingual learners tend to perform less well in assessments of science and are less likely to go into science as a profession (The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). This is not only detrimental to these students—it also is detrimental to the advancement of scientific knowledge. We know that scientific teams that encompass distinctive cultural and other perspectives are more impactful than homogeneous scientific teams (Powell, 2018).
In response, we propose that one contribution to expanding the pathway for multilingual students to move into future success in science education, and potentially into science as a profession, is for educators to gain deeper understandings of what multilingual students know and can do in science via classroom formative assessments that support assessment for learning (Gottlieb, 2016). Our work draws from and builds on the work of others who have created multilingual and multimodal science assessments (e.g., Grapin & Llosa, 2022) and aims to understand whether these practices can be replicated in a broader set of classroom contexts.
To understand how these formative assessment practices could be scaled, our team worked to create an initial assessment design and prototypes, and then to build out additional assessment activities and test them in NC classrooms. In what follows, we share our methods for building out and pilot testing the M2-Si activities, including our initial approach to design and prototyping. We find that educators were able to welcome multilingual and multimodal inputs; that students responded multilingually and multimodally; that the assessment information supported educators’ understandings of student learning; and that educators made instructional changes based on what they learned about students’ learning progress. We close with some discussion of practical and policy implications as well as study limitations and future directions.
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