Educational+Implications

In our research with students A and B, we found that there are various types of improvements that can be made in producing great success with ELLs taking MCAS.

In both interviews the students spoke about being very confident in their ability to succeed on the MCAS. We believe a student’s confidence increases the likelihood of him/her succeeding on the MCAS. Students never spoke about making careless mistakes or feeling like they were rushing because they wanted to just get it over with. Due to this, we are recommending that teachers spend time during the curriculum in creating English based assignments that students can succeed in and allow students the opportunity to practice with past MCAS questions. When students are given past MCAS questions teachers should start off with problems that students can succeed on and setup a positive attitude towards the MCAS.

We found that the two students' preparation were different depending on what the teacher or school felt was more important. One student’s strength was the other's weakness, and vice a versa. We came to the conclusion that preparation for students in MCAS needs to be altered to bring about improvement. In our students' responses we realized that students found difficult what teachers spent less time teaching. We, therefore, think teachers need to be allowed more time for MCAS preparations. Schools need to invest more effort in scheduling ESL learners more time before, during and after school for continued practice opportunities. Providing ESL learners more time is beneficial because teachers would be able to focus more on a variety of skills that students need to succeed on the MCAS. For example, student A found the passages to be the most difficult; we believe that if the teacher had more MCAS preparation time, the student could have been taught additional approaches to reading passages and answering accompanying questions.

ESL learners must be allowed more time on the MCAS and be able to continue their work the next day. In both student interviews they mentioned on how much time they had to spend deciphering words to learn their meanings. In the interviews, both students expressed how they had never taken an exam like the MCAS in their homeland. They also thought that they would have been much more successful on the MCAS if it was in their own native language. Students feel this way because they would be spending less time on basic word meanings, and spending more of their focus on complex vocabulary.

Both students advice other future ESL learners to read a lot and learn as much vocabulary as possible, indicating this was a very important aspect in succeeding on the MCAS. Foreign students are coming in trying to master the basic vocabulary, while American students are spending their time learning more advance complex vocabulary that the MCAS contain. A lot of schools should start implementing Readers Workshop in their schools which allows students to simply read and increase their lexile.

Students A and B think that the MCAS is not necessarily a hard exam when you are well prepared for it. We do not suggest states to exempt students from the MCAS because we do not think ESL learners should be held to lower standards and expectations then the rest. Our belief through results is that English Language Learners should be given more time in preparation for the MCAS, and should be allowed one day to complete each test session section ( 4 days, instead of 2). We do not want to hold our English Language Learners to lower expectations than other students, nonetheless, we must account for their limited experience with the English language in their education.